I have come to drag you out of yourself and take you into my heart.
I have come to bring out the beauty you never knew you had and lift you like a prayer to the sky.
If no one recognises you, I do because you are my life and soul.
Don’t run away, accept your wounds and let bravery be your shield.
It takes a thousand stages for the perfect being to evolve.
Every step of the way I will walk with you and never leave you stranded.
– Rumi
Today’s thought is about hope… and the difference between gently nurturing your sense of hope or ignoring it.
In this context, hope is way softer than an expectation of a specific result. It’s more of a quiet sense of background direction, a flow moving forwards, exact details and route unknown but a direction you want to explore. Hope speaks quietly in words like “may be…” “might” “curious” “possibly” “what if…?” “I wonder…”
Not every moment feels as hopeful, or so connected to that sense of gentle momentum. Sometimes you just splat in a heap, stumble about, or inexplicably decide that you are so close to your dreams, you’d better turn back. Not every recovery from a set back will be stupendously elegant, swift or resourceful. We do the best we can at the time: My scale for “best I can” goes from Complete Pants to Stonkingly Awesome.
Hope matters because it leads you through fear, it hears your doubts and encourages you to consider that maybe not all of those doubts are completely based in fact. Hope reminds you that new things are likely to feel uncomfortable at first, and the answer to that is not to stop, but to practice, gently. Hope can also be a cheeky monkey and play hide and seek, especially if you haven’t been nurturing yourself and are getting a bit frazzled.
But I think one of the ways you can nurture hope is to to treat each moment as a new one.
Hope can be nurtured by reminding yourself that the future is not set. The fact that you’ve ballsed something up, again, does not mean you will balls it up for ever more. The past does not equal your future. The past gives you some experience to draw from. End of.
What you choose to do right now, with this moment, that’s where you can become hopeful again. Especially if you’re willing to make a tiny change, and see how that works out. Hope is stronger than fear, and with a glimmer of hope – or a socking great truckload of it – you can keep taking little steps forwards.
As Thomas Kinkade said, hope is a renewable quality. Renewable at New Year, & New Moons, renewable every moment, every breath. Whether you choose to do something differently or circumstances change around you, some kind of newness will happen.
Hope is a renewable quality
Posted in Creating Daily Nurture
Tagged Dreams, hope, hope is renewable, moment, new year, Nurture
Nurture:
To care for and protect someone or something while they are growing
Young seedlings are tender and can easily be lost. They are vulnerable in multiple ways:
All the above are a right pain in the arse, those beautiful dreams of flourishing plants set back. Particularly a bit of a shocker that you can destroy by too much of something which, in lesser quantities, is beneficial.
New ideas, new habits, new skills, new friendships, new ways of thinking, new projects … they’re all tender and vulnerable too, whilst they develop roots and become stronger: They need protection from too much criticism too soon, from doubts, from over enthusiasm, from overwhelm, from over-reaching, from stalling, from starving.
Discovering how to nurture healthy seedlings that grow into healthy plants is likely to take some learning (i.e. mistakes). You may have to re-sow a few times!! Keep nurturing:
That’s why nurture matters. Nurture enables the new. Success depends not on being brilliant immediately, but on having the patience and persistence to nurture.
Posted in Creating Daily Nurture
Tagged acceptance, gardening, growth, Nurture, patience, Persistence, seedlings, Self Care
Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgement will be surer; since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power of judgement…
Go some distance away because the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lock of harmony of proportion is more readily seen – Leonardo Da Vinci
Get away from it all
Posted in Creating Daily Nurture, Nature's Nurture
Tagged Da Vinci, Proportion, relaxation
Find a Thinking Rock… Ok, what’s a Thinking Rock?
This is a Thinking Rock:
So is this:
It doesn’t actually literally have to be a rock. I do seem to be partial to them myself, but the fact that it’s a rock is not the essential bit. The essential bit is:
So, the Thinking Rock doesn’t have to be a rock, it could be a bench, a handy tree trunk, a sunny patch of grass … Some place outside where you love the views, be they hills and mountains, streams, rivers, parkland, garden, seaside.
Then there’s the “Thinking” bit. You don’t actually think at the Thinking Rock either. The point of the Thinking Rock is that once there, your senses are so full and you feel connected to views so uplifting, that you forget all about conscious thinking.
The Thinking Rock allows your thoughts to stop scampering about trying to find an answer. It tucks your ego up in an awesome snuggle of nature and allows your brain to untangle. It eases fear, tension and grasping for answers. It calms, sooths, rebalances. It brings a little zing of inspiration. Your Thinking Rock is space for you to Just Be. It’s a space where you find it easy to Just Be. In such a place, you can feel what you really feel.
Let nature do the work. Sit and be awed. Allow contents to settle.
Find your Thinking Rock, where you need neither think nor be sat on a rock.
That is all 🙂
Posted in Creating Daily Nurture, Nature's Nurture
Tagged Autopilot, Clarity, Relax, Thinking, thinking space
Today there was snow: Inspiring, beautiful, view-changing, scrunchy crunchy exciting snow. Here’s highlights of some of the views I fed on – no words necessary I think! Wrap up warm, and enjoy your Snow Day 🙂
Pics from the Black Mountains – temporarily white – on the eastern edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park, Wales.
Trust… When reaching out means stepping into the void. When there are no signposts to follow or paths to walk Trust and follow your heart’s vision – Stephanie June Sorrell
We categorise adults who sit in contemplative moods as flakey, spacey, or lazy. But for your brain to do its best work, you need to be idle. If you want to have great ideas or if you just want to get to know yourself, you must stop managing your time. At the very least, modern neuroscience is rapidly amassing more and more evidence that the resting state of the brain is vital to its health – Andrew Smart, Auto Pilot: The art and science of doing nothing
This is one whopping great, year-long permit to include idle time in your day, every day: Amble, gaze at whatever brings you joy, snuggle by an open fire with a glass of wine, picnic by a stream, meditate, nap, watch the clouds go by …
If you have a To Do List, your bit of idle time is not the least important thing on it; it is the most important thing, the thing that’s going to nurture you and maintain you in working condition to handle the other things on that list.
So get a grip and develop your capacity for idling!
Being insanely busy all the time is not only bad for you; it also prevents you from discovering the human being you were meant to be – Andrew Smart, Auto Pilot: The art and science of doing nothing
P.S Winter time can be particularly good for chilling champagne whilst idling 😀
Posted in Creating Daily Nurture
Tagged Andrew Smart, Idle, laze about, Neuroscience
No two walks are ever the same, even if you travel the same route.
Even within a season, the light, temperature, the clouds, the people and wildlife you encounter, the direction you happen to glance in, how you’re feeling… they’re ever changing. For that reason I never tire of walking familiar territory: It is both familiar, and brand new every time.
I also love the excitement of the very first time on a new path or sheep track, the new views that emerge and the sense of discovery waiting to experience whatever is ahead.
Do you have a particular way of relating to nature? A style of relationship? For me it’s a very accepting one, no expectation other than tending to be extremely content in all kinds of conditions, excited by the new, and excitedly seeing new in the familiar.
How wonderful to bring even a smidge of that freshness to the day to day stuff of life… And how wonderful to know the environment which draws out and nurtures such simple pleasure!
Pictures from the Black Mountains, Brecon Beacons National Park, Wales
To walk, amble or gaze at nature is the best restorative I know: Balancing, reliably effective, uplifting, calming.
Wishing you a happy 2015
 | blakmountphoto on Find a Thinking Rock |
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| Rain – the sky… on Nature’s nurture: The be… |
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