(The following is a post that I put on the One Moment One Life Facebook page this morning. It is the first post upon my returning from four days at Clare's Well. There is MUCH in my head to write about and over 380 pictures that I want to eventually sort through and glean out the ones to include in those writings. For now, I enter back into things slowly - hoping to not loose touch with the lessons learned.)

I never know what my time at Clare’s Well will bring to me.  I always go with a certain openness, ready to accept whatever “is” when I am there. This is a lesson learned from the painful experience of attaching to an idea of how things should be and feeling the loss and disappointment of never really “arriving”.  

My first morning there I realized something.  In the past I have felt a distinction between being in this holy space and not being in this holy space. As if, upon stepping on the property or walking into my hermitage, I was entering a place of sacredness. And there is most definitely truth to this. The ground and the beautiful old women that keep it have made it so.  But what became very obvious to me was that this feeling has much more to do with me and the condition of my mind than where I am at.  As I was sitting in my chair the first morning I wrote this down in my journal, “There is a Holiness here because “I” am here. I keep coming back to this special place because what is really happening is that I keep coming back to “me”.

One of the ideas behind Clare’s Well is returning to the Simple. A place of great stillness where you let go of all the demands and “white noise” of the world and sit in the open space of your mind. I am always amazed at how everything begins to look so beautiful to me as I slowly let go. How thoughts and creativity begin to flow in the unrestricted space.  How Nature’s voice seems so clear.

I believe, when we return to the Simple, we return to the Source of all Being. And that Source resides within all of us. It is not something we step onto or arrive at. The holiness is the space we create in our minds. An uncovering of what’s already there – of what has never left us. This is all but impossible when we fill our minds with thought and live in a perpetual state of planning for the next moment, which is really how most of us live out our day. We set our clocks to get up early so we can arrive to work on time. We eat our breakfast quickly in order to not be late. Or maybe we don’t eat our breakfast so that next week we can weigh less. We plan our meetings, plan our suppers, plan our evenings, plan our television time and set our clocks for the appropriate time to wake up. All necessary…but all activities to ensure an appropriate future moment that never seems to arrive.

Returning to the Simple returns us to the Source. And the Source is the only place where there is Life.  If we don’t make time in our days to find the simple, we fail to find Life.

I took this picture as I lay in the hammock on the front porch of my hermitage. I did a lot of this laying around business.  And as good and necessary as it is for this time to come to an end and for me to come home, I am doing so very slowly.  Yesterday I remained unattached from the internet and just listened to my girls as they all found time to catch me up on the events of the last five days.  It felt really good.  In fact, I’m spending this slow integration back into the norm contemplating the extent of my involvement with the “technological world” and social media in general.  It most definitely is not what I would consider the “simple” in my life.

So, I leave you with this picture of my feet, in hopes that it reminds you to care for yourself. To feel your own longing to return to the Source, and to listen to that ache with a compassion that leads to the act of loving yourself. 

Blessed be your journey.