Photos & Spirituality

12/15/2022

Spirituality is interesting. For most of us, it is the nebulous ought’s and ought-not’s handed to us by our families, churches, and culture we grew up in. It’s obeying sensible and weird rules about how to behave. Spirituality is given to us, often without our understanding how much of our sense of who we are is simply a passing along of lots of traditions and rules.

There is another way of understanding spirituality. It’s a way of being awake to the world and moment we are in. Its standing outside on your porch at night, looking at the sky - not to see how lovely it is – but simply to see it. To look as intently as we can at what’s there, what the air around us feels like, what noises we hear, what the universe is humming tonight.

I invited you yesterday, to send photos of right now, where you live, what you are seeing, what is capturing your imagination. Holiday photos are great. So are pictures of nature and pets and what’s going on in your kitchen or craft room or your congregation or classroom.

Instead of fulfilling what we already know and expect from advent, Christmas, December– I’m inviting us to be still and then and look around. What’s your dog yearning for when you look into her face? What is your grandkid learning as she wildly climbs the castles at the playground? What happens when you bite into the first double chocolate cookie you make late at night when you can’t sleep? Those kinds of photos, too.

Here are some photos some of you sent yesterday.

Can you feel the chilly breeze coming up and over that ridge?

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David says of this: “Taken last Sunday at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, at the mineral exhibit. This one is of Pyrite “Sun”, obtained from Sparta, IL. Having a camera in my cell phone allows me to get a lot of photos that would have been impossible back in the day. I can press the cell phone right up against the glass of the display case and there will be no annoying reflections.”

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This is a NASA photo of a star burst which has the Pyrite dynamics of a lifeforce bursting outwards from the middle.

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Len took this photo at our last house.

“The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keeping on
Like a bird that flew
Tangled up in blue”

Bob Dylan

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You can email your photos to me at MB at MaryBethDanielson.com   If I get more pictures from you, I will post them.