Feel Lost - Slowing Down - Time to reflect

Have you ever felt you are lost?   It has been a wet weekend in Auckland and when normally everyone would be out and about enjoying the beauty of this beautiful place they have had to change plans.   For me it has been a massive year and so it draws closer and closer to the end I am realising how tired I am.  It is very easy in this to feel lost.  My standard responce in this situation is to get busier.  This weekend we have not done much at all except hang out as a family.   What I realised this afternoon is how good it is to slow down to breath and enjoy time.   I also found as I did I reflected and was reminded on what I love in life and want and what I don't.   As some one who runs a million miles an hour I am reminded to slow down is as useful as speeding up.   As you seek to change the world and show how you can give a damn take time to reflect.  Slowing down to breathe is so important.   I thought I would share with you a shot my wife took at 5.30am watching the sun rise on her daily walk.   The beauty of what God gives us daily never stops amazing me.  I often look at a sky like this and feel I am no longer lost. 

 

Below is a poem I have come across and been reflecting on.  It really is speaking to me about the need to slow down as the year ends and listen more see more and reflect on the year and what I want life to be about in 2012.  Hope this speaks to you as well.

Lost
Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you.

An old Native American elder story rendered into modern English by David Wagoner, in The Heart Aroused - Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte, Currency Doubleday, New York, 1996