When Your Courage Kindles...Delight!

Here is my gift to you, gentle-reader, potential-pilgrim: someone else’s poetry.

I discovered this delightful piece as I surfed through the mass of amazing offerings the magical-Internet spills into my life each day. (Visit the New Dimensions website – worth lingering over…Google it!).

The advice that accompanied the poem recommended reading it aloud, savoring each phrase. It is a fine practice, reading aloud.

This is a pilgrim poem. Of course I do not think John O'Donohue had the camino to Santiago de Compostela in mind when he wrote these words. But his words describe many of my own feelings as the idea of attempting the pilgrimage came alive in my heart. Are you “…unable to leave what you had outgrown…”? How many of us are trapped by the “…seduction of safety..” ? And what about the “… delight, when your courage kindled…” and you moved forward with the dream to walk the pathway with “…eyes young again with energy and dream, a path of plenitude opening before …” you?

I particularly like the phrase (and philosophy): “…learn to find ease in risk…”

But read on for yourself, read with open heart and pilgrim eyes.

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FOR A NEW BEGINNING

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

From Benedictus: A Book of Blessings
By John O'Donohue (Bantam Press 2007)