JUDY EMERSON Author and Personal Coach

May I be filled with loving kindness.

May I be present.

May I be filled with loving kindness. That all comes from God anyway.

Inhale. Exhale.

Inhale. May I be filled.

Exhaling, may I be loving.

May I be filled with God’s grace. God grace surrounds me. Flows into my lungs with every breath. And I breathe out. Awash in goodness. Whatever I received, whatever I give back. All of it comes from the creator. Morning yellow light rising in the dawn sky.

I’m thinking too much.

Inhale.

Exhale.

The rising day gifting the world, as the world revolves, always, always, receiving the light designed before the beginning of time to fall on us this very day, this morning.

May I be filled with loving kindness.

May I be present. Present, that’s the trouble for me. Words, words, words, words, Thoughts run through my brain. Monkey mind.

Words are only prisms for the light refracted. And the light is God. The light is God’s loving kindness, flowing through our lives, awash in God, awash in light, filled with and contained in and emanating God’s light. Grace that fuels the beating of my heart. The electric pulses, tiny miracles in my brain and muscles and flow of blood, energizing every cell, washing clean and pumping away the detritus, the trash that blocks life. I release the past I have clung to so fiercely, the past I thought defined me. Correction, present tense applies. I still think defines me. It is still in my bones, that thinking the past defines me. I release it again, but it will show up later.

Breathing in God’s loving kindness. Letting go of the past. Breathing in the present moment. Releasing old ways of living. Letting go of old resentments. The past no longer exists. I am remade every day. New cells, new blessings to receive. Today is the new day I’m given. Today I can take in the gift of life. I can make choices for today.

The past is all worn out, its choices spent, left behind. Dead waste on the ground. It’s only my thinking that takes me back there.

May I be filled with loving kindness. God has designed such an intricate gorgeous process for my filling, for my releasing, for my allowing. For my being loved. For my loving back. If only I stayed conscious to it, without my old regret, which is only a thought. Which is only a word. All in God’s design. And the world is as it should be, somehow.

God knew all along we’d mess it up. My individual life messes and the composite messes of the trillions of people who live and have lived, and the messes we inflict on each other and this good earth. God made the arc of the universe, bending towards justice—but that arc is so far beyond our microscopic lives—our nation’s history only a speck. God’s arc of justice longer than the earth itself and its evolution, its season after season, its verdant spring, life rising and blooming and warming to life, and its chilling autumn, its frozen winter the cycle to death.

With every season and every moment, creation manifests the principle of resurrection, life overcoming death. Life begins yet again, its roots pushing deeper through the dead waste of my mistakes and all our moldering mistakes, dead bones of the past. Which are fertilizer for new life pushing up, hatching out, tender shoots reaching for the sunlight, insistently blooming. Babies born and crying out growing toddling becoming fulfilling while old ones letting go their grip and returning to the earth. Ashes to ashes. Returning, and returning, and returning, life dancing toward death dancing toward life, to the emergence and the releasing.

Don’t be scared. This is how it is. How it always has been.

We are dust motes floating in a shaft of God’s light. We are elements in life’s cycle of regeneration, death nourishing life that is birthing now. We catch only the tiniest glimmers of truth.

May I be filled with loving kindness today, this moment. May I be present for this goodness. May I release my old resentments. May I embrace love. May I release my grip on fear. May I observe fear dissolve and drift away in the currents of time.

May I be filled with loving kindness. May I inhale goodness. May I exhale all I have clung to, that has blocked my noticing the blessings, that I have wasted and poured onto the ground. All that is in the past. May I release my regrets. May be present to the sun refracting, the leaf rustling in the tiniest breeze. May I be inspired by the small moments. May I be filled with your loving kindness. May I notice it and give thanks.

May I be present.

God help us. You always do.

Thank you.

Amen