Through the discipline of awareness, we must always be looking and listening if we are to see the windows, and hear what is being spoken to us through them.
- We must learn to look with more than just our eyes and listen with more than just our ears, for the sounds are sometimes faint and the sights sometimes far away.
- We must be aware, at all times and in all places, because windows are everywhere, and at any time we may find one.
The problem is not entirely in finding the room of one’s own, the time alone, difficult and necessary as that is. The problem is more how to still the soul in the midst of its activities.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea)
Re-source: Receptive
Live not just reflectively but receptively
Use the arts to see something else – the soul of the artist.
- Everywhere we look, there are pictures that are not really pictures but windows. If only we have eyes to see beyond the paint.
- What does this story have to say? And what does it have to say to me?
- C.S. Lewis explained the right way to look at a work of art when he said: “We sit down before a picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive.”
“Look over here,” they seem to be saying, “look in this window.”
- It is a window into your soul.
- It is showing you something of who you are, what you love, and what you will be doing with your life if you listen to what your life is saying, and where it is calling you.
And every now and then we catch something else. A glimpse of the future. Our future.
- A glimpse we caught when we came across a window suddenly flung open in front of us, its gossamer curtains lifted by a breeze redolent with the future, filling our lungs with refreshing air and our heart with hopeful dreams.
craving and resource from ““Windows of the Soul” by Ken Gire