Sacred River: It's not easy to get my spiritual river flowing in the cold of winter, but I still try.

Sacred River by Theresa King

Flowing over rocks of pain
Cleansing through the sands of time
Collecting streams of insight
Graced with buds of wisdom
Heaped with leaves of knowledge
Blessed with light of self love
And flowing, gently flowing
To the vast divine sea
Saying
"I am That."

This poem recently came into my hands this past weekend at a workshop. I must say it is a pretty moving run-on sentence if I ever saw one. I cannot get it to show on the webpage like it does in my book, but I think you get the idea.

I really like the picture the words paint, and although right now the rivers in Minnesota are pretty cold and icy, I find this poem to ignite something inside of me that brings me here to reflect a bit.

I think most people can agree at some point in their life they have had a moment where they felt a sort of longing inside of them. We do not know what to name it, but often it is a longing to be part of something greater than oneself. It is not the longing to be confused with the will to find a partner or companion, but it is the longing that is bigger than that desire. It is bigger than ourselves. This longing to me seems to be on a spiritual level, on a level that for the most part appears outside of our reach in worldly terms.

The problem is that we believe that it is out of our reach. This belief is simply not true.

Today people do not take the time to see or reflect on anything in spiritual terms. I know I am guilty of it. For the most part we have truly turned to science for information and we use science as the backdrop to our reality. We ignore and abandon our intuition and our mind and body's wisdom, and instead we rely on scientific reasoning and expensive medical tools or conventional wisdom to tell us how to make our choices and decisions in life.

We may experience wondrous miracles or the friendly warmth of a neighbor, but we do not think about these everyday moments, feelings or connections to be tied to a deeper, spiritual phenomenon.

I like this poem because it reminds me again that our everyday experiences and our very being is of a spiritual nature whether we choose to notice or not. Whether a believer in a higher power or a person who has no faith whatsoever, we are all people made of energy and when we pay close attention to our energy we can truly see the divine that lies within us, waiting for us to recognize it and pay attention to it.

This idea of paying attention is important to me. It's not an easy thing to cultivate and will take lots of years of practice to get it down. However, the long-term benefits are worth it because the more you pay attention to something, the more it seems to come up in your life. For example when you pay close attention to the negative parts of a person, it seems you only find more negative. Same with focusing so deeply on what is wrong at a workplace; our brains are trained so well to search for what we are looking for, we then only find more wrongs in the situation.

What would happen if we searched for the spiritual? What would happen if we challenged ourselves in that way? Instead of choosing not to believe and looking for the reasons not to have faith, what if we looked at it from a different perspective?

I believe we would find that sacred place we long for.

To close this random thought of the day, I will end by stating some questions/thoughts I want to focus on as a result of this post.

* How can I get my spiritual river flowing? In other words, how can I pay better attention to the spiritual aspect of my being and how can I nourish my spiritual self?
* What do I learn from myself when I look deeply at the spiritual aspects of my life?
* How does paying attention to my spiritual needs affect my health?
* How does paying attention to my spirituality affect the world?