Tian Dayton

I will open my life to the act of giving today. Giving and receiving are
the same channel. When I am able to truly give, I have tuned into the
channel, opened the pipeline, through which I receive. When I love
another, I am loving the self-giving and receiving love. The act of
giving is the key. In giving I receive, in loving I open to experience
love-the world is impartial. If I open the vessel of me, it will be
filled.

I give and I love.

The essential truth about the existence of man is in the Gospels. What
we are, what we hope, what we need, is contained in the Gospels. But
they can be difficult. An easier bridge to their meaning is St. Francis
of Assisi. Simply, Saint Francis says the key to the purpose of life is
giving. In giving, you find happiness. You find peace. If you give, you
find you are serving your purpose in life. In loving, you find love.
Franco Zeffirelli from “The Meaning of Life”

Today I will open myself to receive. Much of what I experience as lack
in my life is really my inability to see life as constantly giving to
me. When I put myself into a receptive state, what blocks do I place in
my own path? Do I feel worthy of a healthy, happy life? Do I trust that
it is possible for life to work out? Am I able to visualize a good life?
Am I willing to forego my attachment to negativity and control so that
my life can be fully positive? Really this universe is already abundant.
Nature is constantly striving to produce-to meet my needs. My ability to
open myself to receive this generosity and abundance is how I clear the
channels for it to come to me. My ability to recognize it and to be
grateful for it is how I hold it in my life.

I open myself to receive all good that is coming to me.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Winston Churchill

I will look beyond time and space into the infinite nature of the
universe, into soul. What I see around me is not all there is to this
world. Call me crazy, but I see more. I trust my eyes and I trust my
heart. What I see with my mind and my heart are just as real for me as
what I see with my eyes. Reality is multi-layered. When I am still and
quiet it unfolds itself to me. Its wisdom and meaning seep effortlessly
into my pores. I come to understand truth and soul because I sense its
presence within me. I am a part of this divine mystery of life. I am
indivisible with the whole, a cog in an ever-turning wheel of time,
beyond which lies eternity, more life, more me, more it.

I see beyond time and space.

The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that
degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and
insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in this
world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures
of the force of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today I do not need to have everything I love in my life at every
moment. Because I care about something, a relationship, a house, a
situation, does not mean that I am going to lose it. I trust now that
people, places and things in life come and go. That is the nature of it
all. Nothing I can do will change that. When I learn to roll with the
natural vicissitudes of life, they somehow feel less threatening. I am
more willing to allow people, places and things be removed from me
because I have come to understand that they will return in the same or
different forms. Today I know that that is true; it is the nature of
life. But it is a loss that is constantly filled with gain.

I let go so that I can be filled again.

Nothing in the world lasts save eternal change.
Honorat de Bueil, Marquis de Racan

I will not resist my animal nature today. If I am truly a part of a
divine plan, then all of me is meant to be here, both my animal and
spirit sides have soul potential encoded into them. I will not sever
myself from my own humanity in order to become something beyond
myself-my becoming is in my being, my soul and my person are of the same
stuff.

I balance my physical and soul nature.

I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular -
shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints
precisely over the prints of my hands?-but I might learn something of
mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses
and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in
necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last
ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel
lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the
weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything,
remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
Annie Dillard