April 1, 2016
What's Happening This Week at SpiritualityandPractice.com
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Editor's Pick
By KidSpirit Online
To celebrate our seventh year of bringing you a new poem each day during National Poetry Month, we have a marvelous gift: poems by creative young voices tackling life's big questions together. To kick off April's feast of poetry, join Anya Dunaif for "
The Journey of the Mind."
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Practices
Many different cultures and religious traditions acknowledge the significance of transitional places and times. This is something Frederic and Mary Ann have been thinking about since their cat Merton started sleeping on a threshold in their new home. See how you can make crossing thresholds a spiritual practice.
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We salute the inter-species peace ambassador who wrote, "We still have a way to go. But we are moving in the right direction. If we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion, we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution -- and realize, at last, our most unique quality."
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E-Courses
Ways to Pray from Around the World
An e-course by Maggie Oman Shannon
April 4 - 29, 2016
What remarkable ways people pray! We display
prayer flags. Dress in ceremonial costumes. Listen to the resonant sounds of a prayer bowl. Draw mandalas. Count prayer beads. Learn new ways to pray that are hands-on and visual, and share your own. Sign up here:
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A new e-course by Joan Chittister
April 3 - 30, 2016
The quality of mercy is twice blessed, Shakespeare reminds us: It blesses those who give and those who receive. Let this blessing fall freshly upon you and all those you encounter through the sage guidance of a visionary who truly walks her talk. Sign up here:
www.SpiritualityandPractice.com/JourneyintoMercy
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Films
Directed by Jeffrey D. Brown
This harrowing story of modern day sex trafficking represents one of tens of thousands of instances of young women sold into slavery each year. Learn how you can help protect victims.
More Films: Catching the Sun, Eye in the Sky, Standing Tall, The Divergent Series: Allegiant, A Space Program, The Brainwashing of My Dad, Hello, My Name Is Doris
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DVDs
Directed by Peter Landesman
A Nigerian-born forensic pathologist, Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), risks his career as he demonstrates reverence in a quest for the truth about dementia resulting from blows to a football player's head.
More DVDs:
In Defense of Food, Mediterranea, Humans, Nova: Memory Hackers, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, James White, The Letters
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Books
Set your spirit free and allow the music to move you! This authoritative paperback makes a very good case for the art of dance as a legitimate form of meditation and a creative path for living your life.
More Books: Hidden in God, Becoming, Darkness Before Dawn, Clearing Emotional Clutter, 90 at 90
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Children's Books
This outstanding treasury features best-loved nursery rhymes but also new discoveries from Native American, First Nation, Inuit, and Maori cultures -- on spreads created by 77 artists, many of them award-winning illustrators of children's books.
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Arts
By Jim Kalnin and Lois Huey-Heck
This uplifting book encourages us to open our imaginative capacities, explore the bounties of the human adventure, and see the ordinary as filled with light and beauty.
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Blogs
By Darren Polito
Here's the ceremony we and 75 others used to greet Spring, observe our website's 10th Anniversary, and officially open our new Center for Spirituality & Practice in Claremont on March 20. It had three parts because threes invite unlimited perspectives and show us that we are integrally braided into the universe.
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Traditions
Learn about the courtesy practices of adab, experience awe-inspiring beauty, remember the Beloved. These and other blessings of threshold realms come to us from the Sufi path.
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From Our Wisdom Archive
In this book excerpt, Wes "Scoop" Nisker suggests that we celebrate our foolishness: "that every truth we stumble on will probably be overturned."
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A Thought to Carry with You
Most of us give ourselves way too little time to look absurdity in the face, so April Fool's Day comes as an essential reprieve. "A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed," G.K. Chesterton tells us, "but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish." Douglas Adams, with his usual wild wit, says it even more strongly: "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable."
Then he adds, "There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
This week, we invite you to let inexplicability be. If there doesn't seem to be a design making sense of your life at the moment, don't force one. Remember the art of experimentation and untidiness that children know so well. "Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived," Anne Lamott reminds us. "What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here." Play with the pieces of your life, and perhaps with the aid of a little divine foolishness you can sculpt them into something unexpected, robust, and free.
Blessings,
Your Spirituality & Practice Team
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
Patricia Campbell Carlson
Darren Polito
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