Keep Attending to the Grace

Here’s something I took from Martin Shaw. “Keep attending to the grace”.

How did I attend to the grace today?

I worry on days like this, when grace is so hard to find amidst the mundane and uninspired, I wonder just how much we are letting our humanity fade away. When was the last time I’ve had a deep conversation with someone about what truly matters? When was the last time I felt close to the divine? When was the last time I felt… something?

We need rituals. They are etched on our psyche. No, more than that. They are the containers, the river banks, on which our psyche flows.

They are the paths in which the sacred can become part of us.

It’s hard, you see, to keep attending to the grace on your own. It’s almost impossible to hold rituals on your own. It was always meant to be a communal effort.

This is our collective challenge.

We only have fragments of possibility, whispers of memory, rituals that were and could be again.

We must become the elders we never had.

We must follow the guidance we never knew.

We must create the rituals we cannot possibly imagine.

The business of becoming human is a never-ending journey. It’s endless, thankless, and invisible. It takes place in the dark, silent moments we can steal from the machine, to remember who we are meant to be, to feel how we are meant to feel.

And it is up to us, the living ones, you and me, alive right now, to keep that “human essence” present in the collective consciousness. Not letting it fade into nothingness, leaving behind a grey mass of screens, cogs, and bones.

Here’s how I attended to the grace today:

• I arranged different coloured leaves and lay them by the trees.
• I “rescued” earthworms stranded in the pavement by returning them to the earth.
• I stood by my favourite tree with my eyes closed.
• I looked into the distance at the Autumn colours in the forest.

Today I heard the “True Love Prayer”. Here are the first lines:

May divine grace be your companion

As you hold your vision in stillness

Have faith that true love is real

I don’t think any one of us knows for certain what “grace” is. But we can invoke it.

And the natural world helps a lot.