A Daily Doorway

In his beautiful poem, “The Meaning of Simplicity,” the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos wrote:

Every word is a doorway
to a meeting, one often cancelled,
and that’s when a word is true: when it insists on the meeting.

In this time of COVID-19 and necessary precautions around meetings and contact with one another, I appreciate this poem’s clear reminder that we still have so many ways to safely connect with one another — and with the sacred source of life itself — engaging our human gift of language. Whether it’s in writing or speaking, online or physically but across our social distancing, we are invited to turn to words for connection to one another and to the sacred truths carried in our own hearts.

Early on in my experience of “being safe at home,” I woke up in the middle of the night, processing the events of the day and as I did a single word rose from all the others with a curious insistence. Spaciousness, was the word. I turned it over and over, wondering why it was there, keeping me awake in the middle of the night.

The next morning, I let that word prompt my morning spiritual practice of writing. And I discovered, within the new confines of pandemic living, I was gaining a more nuanced understanding of spaciousness — where it could be found and how it could be cultivated even in the smallest of spaces.

Since then, seeking some structure to guide my daily writing through these pandemic times, each morning I have ended my morning meditation by waiting for a word to rise out of the silence. Then I have let that word prompt my daily practice of writing, asking myself what new depth does that word offer me now, or what new understandings of the holy emerge from exploring that word in the context of today’s world and times.

Today, I am beginning to share that practice with you by posting a new word here each day, accompanied by a few brief questions, as a doorway inviting you into your own encounter with the truth of your experience of these times. You don’t have to write much. It could be a single sentence or maybe just a paragraph. If you write just that much each day, you will not only have the gift of a daily pause for reflecting in the midst of so much change; you’ll also leave a record of how you have experienced the extraordinary challenges of this time. It will offer you something to return to in the future, to consider how and where you encountered your own truth and meaning in the face of such a rapidly changing world. I’ll try to post a new prompt each day, but there may be some days when I don’t post or others when I post two. (Life can be like that!)

Daily Word 1: Spaciousness

Where do you find spaciousness in your life now? In time? In space? In solitude? In relationships Inside or outside? How are you clearing and claiming the space within or around you for something that makes your life sing? How might you live into it?