Beginnings

I once read an essay about the beginnings of stories. It quoted the great literature and talked about why some beginnings were so good. I don't remember much of what it said but it clearly differentiated the good ones from the bad ones. At least one thing is true of them both; beginnings always circumscribe the infinite. Before a beginning the potential is limitless.

This is a kind of beginning for me in many ways.

This blog was nearly called "Extradordinary Ordinariness" or "Wide Open Spaces" but ultimately "Compassionate Space" rang out most truthfully as what the blog was trying to accomplish. In this compassionate space, I hope to bring forward the everyday miracles of life that are present with a little awareness. I hope we can share life as it touches us, sensing that our sharing is not a separate part of life but one of the many forms through which life communicates with itself.

Life is indeed filled with the extraordinary in the ordinary and it is true that through giving wide open space to all that is before us we invite peace, but compassionate space as a title resonated and I have come to trust those little inclinations.

Yesterday, I witnessed a doe that had been shattered and dragged to the side of the road. Once a creature of magnificent grace and beauty, it lay there lifeless and decomposing. Life is so very precious. Be the space for it to happen. Why make a problem out of it? To have a problem is to be identified with the circumstances of your life, but YOU are not your so called "problems", YOU are so must vaster. Draw on that depth. You are the compassionate space through which the world unfolds. Be still and see if this is true for you.

Tell me, where do you begin?