#simple abundance

✨Friday, January 17, 2025

✨Daily Passage: “Harmony: Achieving Balance in Our Lives” ✨Daily Tarot: 2 of Pentacles 🌟 Bonus Tarot: Reversed 6 of Swords

✨Spirit seems to have made my fingers extra buttery lately, lol. The last three days, I have ended up with a bonus card popping out from the shuffle.

✨Juggling priorities & finding balance amidst life’s demands may feel especially challenging when we’re stuck in old patterns & feeling overwhelmed. When you release what no longer serves you, life’s responsibilities get a little bit easier to manage.

✨“Harmony is the inner cadence of contentment we feel when the melody of life is in tune. . . . Perhaps this explains why we often hear only a cacophony of dissonant demands that drown out the symphonies our souls long to compose.” –Simple Abundance

✨“Usually, when the distractions of daily life deplete our energy, the first thing we eliminate is the thing we need the most: quiet, reflective time. Time to dream, time to think, time to contemplate what’s working and what’s not, so that we can make changes for the better.” –Simple Abundance

✨“With harmony as your guide, trust that your everyday moments will soon begin to resonate in a rhapsody of fulfillment.” –Simple Abundance

✨2 of Pentacles: “Sometimes it is the hardest thing to accomplish, to find balance between the magic and the tangible. The tangible offers a firm grounding in the world, a sense of security. The magic calls to the deeper parts of the soul and offers a connection to universe. This card signifies that you certainly feel the push & pull; it is simply a matter of balancing the two lives together in perfect harmony.” –Guardian Tarot

✨R 6 of Swords: “As a reverse card, you need time to process the losses you have had through your life. Allow yourself time, it is okay.” –Guardian Tarot

✨Traditional Rider Waite Smith: 🎴 2 of Pentacles: adaptable, balance, flexibility, resourcefulness. 🎴 R 6 of Swords: avoidance, carrying baggage, feeling trapped, stuck in the past.

January 7, 2016. Thursday 6:33am

"How happy are you right now? In 1926 a young English woman named Joanna Field, began to feel…that she did not know what made her truly happy. She kept a journal…the journal, “A Life of One’s Own” was published in 1934.

It was written, she confided, in the spirit of a detective who searches through the minutiae of the mundane in hopes of finding clues for what was missing in her life.”   From the Book Simple Abundance. A Day Book of Comfort and Joy by Sarah Ban Breathnach

On the January 7 page.

End of this part of the entry

My margin note to the above: 

 Jason, although conceding that I love my work, thinks I should jump and run.

But, there is pleasure in the pilgrimage.

Suzzie said “You’re work is here. Say “Yes” to it. The negative will fall away.

Can age 40 comprehend age 60’s pilgrimage? Age 70 can.

_____________________________________________________

Additional margin note to above entry: 

Just reading her book again now! (Re: A Life of One’s Own).  

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Note: 

In 2016, my personal trainer Jason wanted me to move to Costa Rica and become a counselor at a “meditation” clinic of sorts. Jason was 40.

I had an active criminal law practice going in Modesto, California at the time, but was struggling financially.

Suzzie, age 70, owner of Intrinsic Elements, a new age store in Modesto, said “Your work is here. Say “Yes” to it. The negative will fall away."

Two suggestions , Both given on January 6, 2016. 

I was 60 at the time.

Dear sisters,

Today's devotion in Simple Abundance begins with a quotation from T. S. Eliot.

           "These are only hints and guesses,

            Hints followed by guesses, and the rest

            Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action."

I strongly believe that God speaks to everybody.  However, unlike Moses' burning bush experience or the mountain showdown between Elijah and his God on one side and the pagan priests and their ineffectual deity on the other, God's speech is frequently not obvious.  He frequently speaks in hints and guesses, and His voice is not always easy to discern

One person who is or was very good at hearing from God is Daddy.  However, even God's very direct communication with him largely consisted of hints and guesses.  Daddy had a dream in which he was attending a communion service in the chapel.  Unlike the real chapel, this chapel had the communion wafer in a Roman Catholic style monstrance, something very uncommon in the Episcopal Church.  In the dream, the monstrance started to fall.  Daddy leapt up and grabbed it to stop it from hitting the floor.  He pushed and pushed and lifted and lifted, but it was very heavy, even monstrances are not in real life.  That was the dream.  Daddy did not know what it meant.  A friend of his told him that he thought it was a call to the priesthood because only the priest lifts the communion wafer or the host at the altar, and Daddy assumed that role.  At the end of another dream, Daddy saw a cross of nails, a type of cross particular to a church in England that was bombed.  He took that as a sign that he was supposed to study for the priesthood in England.  His bestie from England asked me to be his baby's godmother.  I basically thought I was not good enough and I'm not.  Daddy told me that he had a mental image the previous week of a little boy offering up his barley loaves and fish, which Jesus then used to feed thousands of people.  He said that it was inadequate; it was not good enough; it was a laughably small amount; but Jesus used it and blessed it anyway.  He said if only people who were good enough did God's work, God's work would not get done.  He said that he thought the mental image God gave him that previous week was intended for me.  God speaks to Daddy more directly than anyone else I know, and yet He still frequently speaks even to him in hints and guesses.

A friend of Mummy's when we were little said she did not know how much of a micromanager God is.  How involved is He in our everyday lives?  Mummy said that she tried to be religious about observing spiritual disciplines and then would go with her gut instinct.  She said that as long as she was disciplined about the spiritual disciplines, she believed that her gut instinct was frequently the Holy Spirit.

Mummy is a now retired doctor and a doer.  Once I told an old man at a coffee shop that I was reading Dr. Doolittle.  He said, "I know many doctors who do very little."  I shall probably never be any kind of doctor, but I have "do very little" down pat.  Being disciplined is good for picking up more hints and guesses and is also good for improving the quality of our thoughts.  However, at the end of the day, we want to be remembered as people who did things and who will be worshipers and doers throughout eternity.  Anyway, I love y'all.  Y'all are lovers; y'all are prayers; y'all are sisters and thinkers and doers.  Y'all are the best.

Go happy,