Friends,
On this wintry December afternoon, I’m thinking of you and reaching through the Love that enfolds us all to invite you to share a moment of grace with me.
Just for this moment, step away from whatever you’re doing and open your senses, open your heart to the sprawling beauty of our world. Just for this breath, and the next, take in the beauty of air brushing your skin; the beauty of trees and earthworms, wind, birds, spiders, sun, rain.
Beauty in its multitudinous forms is just one of the many gifts that grace offers us.
Touch, with your senses and your more-than-physical senses, the lives that flourish within you and all around you, most so minuscule they are invisible to our eyes. Know them as part of your body, part of the body of the earth. Know them as kin, each one essential to the great biosphere that breathes through and enlivens us all.
Feel the miracle of your self, of your family of inner selves – utterly unique, irreplaceable; unfolding from moment to moment; fluid; shaping and being shaped by every encounter you have with the billions of other life forms with whom your life is intertwined.
Grace is always a gift. It cannot be summoned, seduced, cajoled or earned; only embraced, only received.
There is deep agony in our world today. Suffering that cries out for witnessing, healing, holding, repair, redemption, transformation.
We stand as witnesses to the world’s suffering as well as our own. We are the Sacred incarnate, and we are human. There is great power in our species’ ability to choose how we will live, and to act to fulfill our vision of a loving world. We share a profound responsibility to use our gifts to serve the soul of the world, to fulfill its purposes, which include provision, justice, communion, joy and peace for all beings.
In our humanity, we are the wounds, the wounded and the wounding. We are conduits for the medicine that makes whole what has been broken, exiled, split apart largely through human actions.
Every single one of us has the capacity to participate in restoring our world to its natural state of grace. None of us is too young or too old, too rich or too poor — too this or too that — to do our part. We contribute who we are, the gifts we’ve been given, the gifts we’ve cultivated, to this essential task. And what we contribute is always enough in the realm of grace.
We can be allies and agents of grace in the simplest of ways. By the quality of care and attention we bring to our everyday encounters. By nurturing our own bodies and hearts, tending to those in our sphere, extending welcome and hospitality to the human and non-human world alike. Touching everything our hands encounter with love, with respect, with appreciation. Building, in ourselves, in our homes and in our businesses, the qualities of the world in which we want to live.
Grace lives in the heart of our humanity. We don’t need to zoom out to the rim of the cosmos to find it – it’s right here, in you, in me, in the way we live our everyday lives.
Grace lives in choosing to love every part of you, especially the parts of which you are embarrassed or ashamed; the parts you have banished to the underlands of your life. Grace lives in the act of pouring the honey of mercy into the bitter tea of judgment. It is the clear light of truth that disperses the fog of confusion and dissembling. Grace is the intimacy that reaches out to comfort the child having a meltdown in the grocery store aisle and the parent at the end of their tether trying to cope with the epic tantrum of the day.
Grace enters when you choose not to honk at the SUV that cuts in front of you, forcing you to slam on your brakes, heart racing. Grace is the act of cleaning up your mess before you go to bed at night, so the space around you can rest in beauty and peace too.
Grace harmonizes your life with the rhythms and cycles that weave the tapestry of day and night, the phases of the moon and the seasons of the year.
Like all soul qualities, grace is both vastly complex and ultimately simple. The Deva of Grace offers its companionship and its prodigious gifts, quietly, without insistence. All you need to do is recognize it, welcome it, and embrace it. Your friendship with it will call forth the grace that lives in you; it will alchemize your life so you become the arms and heart and cradling lap of grace.
Take a walk with the Deva of Grace this week. Invite it to accompany you as you move through your days towards the end of this year. Get to know it. Let it get to know you.
Invite it into your moments of quiet contemplation, joyful celebration — and into your thorniest, most complex challenges. Notice what happens when you meet the challenge of crafting a new direction in your business where the outcome is uncertain – one that carries the potential for great risk or great reward – with the spirit of grace by your side. When you’re facing a difficult but essential conversation with a team member or client; or a recurring argument with a family member.
What happens when the spirit of grace accompanies you, and generates the field in which these challenges are held?
Let go of attachment to any particular outcome; relinquish your assumptions about how the Deva of Grace will show up. Like all Devas, it serves a wholeness whose beauty and vastness you can barely comprehend.
Stay open, receptive, and curious.
Surrender walks in the footsteps of grace.
What emerges in your life when you befriend the Deva of Grace?
In this season of excess, let grace infuse your choices and actions. Let grace inform your being and becoming.
May you know the joy of being the companion, ally, and partner of grace today.
Love, Hiro