Good Morning Digital Neighbors & Friends! Lent is rapidly approaching and my visits among your on the inter-webs will be far less frequent. Lent will pass quickly enough and new normals will be in place for daily habits, some will last and other will revert back to easier and sadly less disciplined paths of living. Time will tell.

I enjoyed the thoughts from John O'Donohue so a few more visits with him before my departure seems beneficial. I like the way he frames his thoughts about life, it is a great outlook to adopt if you don't possess it already. It can free us into a natural courage that casts out fear and opens up our lives to become voyages of discovery, creativity, and compassion. All that flows from the act of trust in another person. A stranger becomes a friend, a gathering becomes a community, divergent paths can become one for a common goal, purpose or cause. Trust is so sacred, when it is shared is a moment of profound gratitude and grace, when it is violated it is among life's greatest pains and sorrows.

We all need someone to trust, maybe not many, but a few people at least to help us in our pilgrimage of life. Without a few trusting companions, I suspect many and most of us turn into people incapable of receiving or giving trust and will face a great loneliness that no other creature can know. Then loneliness is often the doorway to depression, distorted internal dialogue, the magnification of darker elements within our heart that can become a terrible prison.

When trust is present in life, loneliness is often kept at bay, trust is a light against that darkness, and our aloneness can become solitude rather than loneliness. Solitude is a place of discovery, of self, the world, of relationships. Solitude is a place of aloneness and yet connectedness, loneliness is a place of isolation, disconnection even and often in a crowd of people. Solitude knows its face, loneliness has no face. Both require an awareness of being alone, but they bear such different fruit. Trust, in someone, is the subtle little difference that is all the difference. Well, that is my 2 cents - John O' Donohue has better stuff to share, I was but the appetizer.

Though we know one another’s names and recognize one another’s faces, we never know what destiny shapes each life. The script of individual destiny is secret; it is hidden behind and beneath the sequence of happenings that is continually unfolding for us. Each life is a mystery that is never finally available to the mind’s light or questions. That we are here is a huge affirmation; somehow life needed us and wanted us to be. To sense and trust this primeval acceptance can open a vast spring of trust within the heart. It can free us into a natural courage that casts out fear and opens up our lives to become voyages of discovery, creativity, and compassion. No threshold need be a threat, but rather an invitation and a promise. Whatever comes, the great sacrament of life will remain faithful to us, blessing us always with visible signs of invisible grace. We merely need to trust.

To Bless the Space Between Us John O'Donohue

The Carpathians in Poland