Inspirations and Illuminations

How can a Jim-Carrey-being-Jim-Carrey film make me cry?  How can one film be so irreverent and yet so overtly spiritual at the same time?  This morning I was watching Bruce Almighty  again while doing a little stitching.  It's probably the fifth time I've seen the film, and I found myself, as always, being moved by Bruce's transformation, the treatment of fervent and honest prayer, and the question of "unanswered" prayer.  I'll issue a spoiler alert here, but since the film is 20 years old, if you haven't already seen it, you probably aren't going to.   Just a not-so-little overview:  Bruce is a television news reporter whose career is going nowhere.  He's stuck doing human interest stories he sees as beneath him, but longs to be promoted to news anchor when a current anchor retires.  His dissatisfaction with his job spills over into his personal life, which he shares with his ever-faithful girlfriend, Grace, a kindergarten teacher, and ...

I had an idea of what I was going to write for this week, but then I was listening to Spotify's Happy Mix while doing some cross stitching this morning.  The mix is very well-named, and includes Bill Withers' "Lovely Day," a few Meghan Trainor ditties (💖💖💖), Sara Bareilles' "Brave," and "Born this Way" by Lady Gaga.  As always, though, when "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield came on, I had to stop everything and listen.  My list of uplifting songs is ever growing, but this one will always be in the top five.  As someone who has always had a creative bent, this song really speaks to me:  "Staring at the blank page before you/Open up the dirty window/Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find . . ."  Like Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4" (yep, that's what that song is about!) for the 21st century.  I don't know about you, but a blank book thrills me down to my toes--all that untouched paper, all ...

 I have a goal for January and February of this year to write one blog a week.  Like New Year's resolutions, this went well for the first two weeks of the year, and I even wrote my second week's blog a day early.  Today, I'm stuck.  Of course, I've received some "inspirations and illuminations" this week, but nothing that sparks my creativity, or my desire to write.  So I looked up quotes about getting stuck.  I scrolled right past Joel Osteen to Anne Lamott, one of my all-time faves:   “If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark . . ."   Most of my life, my "solution" to being stuck is avoidance.  Procrastination.  I even tell myself that I work best under pressure, as justification for waiting until the last minute.  Sometimes that's true for the quality of my work, but it doesn't do much for me mentally or spiritually.  In...

  I attended my weekly Meaningful Conversations group today.  It's a fun group of people, mostly from Nashville and nearby, but we also have people from California and DC in the states, and from Quebec, Grenada, and England.  We're a diverse bunch religiously, as well, and though our jumping-off point for our discussions is Baha'i writings, we get lots of great perspectives from adherents of other religions and those who aren't particularly religious.  I've been attending this group by Zoom since September, and when we miss a week for a holiday or in-person meeting, I really miss not only the conversation, but the people.  I've only met a couple of them in person, but have come to see all of them as friends. Today's discussion was about spiritual New Year's resolutions.  One of the questions we talked about was "What qualities and attitudes will help us achieve our spiritual goals?"  That's not something we think about much when we set our ...

 A few years ago, I decided that instead of New Year's resolutions, I would have a word of the year, and that word would ideally be my guiding principle for the year.  To be perfectly honest, it hasn't worked out all that well, mainly because I write the word on the front page of my new planner for the year, and then promptly forget about it until I'm setting up the next year's planner.  So, my word of the year for 2022 was "fruitful."  Not in the sense of having babies, mind you--that ship has long sailed.  But the idea was that I would intentionally do things during the year that would make a positive difference in the world.  Now, the problem with "fruitful" was twofold:  first, I didn't make any plans that would enable me to be fruitful, so it was haphazard at best; and second, and more importantly, I didn't think about what fruit is. We have a half-crabapple, half-apple tree in our front yard.  We planted the crabapple tree many years ag...