A Blessing

 Connie Popp sent me this and it is by Jan Richardson in Circle of Grace - I like it enough to copy it here for you just the way I received it. I do not think I have shared it before and it is a blessing that stays with me and really helps when we think we are doing too much....

This blessing keeps nothing for itself. You can find it by following the path of what it has let go, of what it has learned it can live without.

Say this blessing our loud a few times and you will hear the hollow places within it, how it echoes in a way that gives your voice back to you as if you had never heard it before.

Yet this blessing would not be mistaken for any other, as if, in emptying, it had lost what makes it most itself. It simply desires to have room enough to welcome what comes.

Today, it's you.

So come and sit in this place made holy by its hollows. You think you have too much to do, too little time, too great a weight of responsibility that none but you can carry.

I tell you, lay it down. Just for a moment, if that's what you can manage at first. Five minutes.                  Lift up you voice- in laughter, in weeping, it does not matter - and let it ring against these spacious walls.

Do this until you can hear the spaces within your own breathing. Do this until you can feel the hollow in your heart where something is letting go, where something is making way.