A Friday ritual.
A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. Inspired by SouleMama (through daily doings). If you’re inspired to do the same, leave a link to your ‘moment’ in the comments for all to find and see.

The lesson which life constantly repeats is to ‘look under your feet.’ You are always nearer to the divine
and the true sources of your power than you think.
The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive.
The great opportunity is where you are.
Do not despise your own place and hour.
Every place is under the stars.
Every place is the center of the world.

John Burroughs

A Friday ritual.
A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. Inspired by SouleMama (through daily doings). If you’re inspired to do the same, leave a link to your ‘moment’ in the comments for all to find and see.

If you’re looking for ways to make your Christmas gifts more meaningful this year (or just looking for some really great coffee), please consider buying this fairly-traded, sustainably-farmed coffee to help Jeremy and Elizabeth bring their babies home. As if that weren’t enough incentive, 5% of every sale of Just Love Coffee goes to support clean water projects in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya.

Here’s the link to their coffee sales page https://justlovecoffee.com/about/beneficiary/zzpetals/. You can also go to their blog, ZuZu’s Petals, to read more about their story and to see other ways to support their adoption.

A Friday ritual.
A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. Inspired by SouleMama (through daily doings). If you’re inspired to do the same, leave a link to your ‘moment’ in the comments for all to find and see.

Ack, this post is just the same as most of my Wrestling the Tigers posts. I am wasting my time, wasting my life, sitting here under the weight of an enormous, merciless beast.

And the answer is still the same: Focus on the moment and what needs to be done. Do what you can and don’t worry about what you are not doing. Enjoy the times when you do feel well enough to go out and observe and worship and play, like this, and this, and this.

Still, it’s really hard not to feel like I am wasting my wild and precious life.

The finding: There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.

The more women in a group, the higher the group scored on their tasks –brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles, and solving one complex problem.

Another great quote from the article:

What do you hear about great groups? Not that the members are all really smart but that they listen to each other. They share criticism constructively. They have open minds. They’re not autocratic. And in our study we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups.

That last bit reminds me of 1 Corinthians 12. “But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.”

Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired.  I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little.  And this is something I remember very well.  At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where the east was because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning.  Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down.  Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them.  It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them.  I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I would have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it.  And then I said, “Look at the moon.”  And he did.  We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up.  They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them.  And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon.

My father said, ‘I would never have thought this place could be beautiful.  I’m glad to know that.’