My prayer beads are strung on my life span.
I am not allowed to skip a single bead:
Sometimes the bead is a seed. Or a bone.
Or jade, Or dry blood. Or semen. Or crystal.
Or rotted wood. Or a sage’s relic. Or gold.
Or glass. Or a prism. Or iron. Or clay. Or an
eye. Or an egg. Or dung. Or a ball. Or a
stone. Or a peach. Or a bullet. Or a bubble.
Or lead. Or pure light.
No matter what the next bead is, I must
count it.
Perform my daily austerities.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Until repetition becomes endurance.People seldom understand the power of repetition. What is repeated over and over again can become enduring: what is done in a moment is seldom lasting. If farmers do not tend to their fields every day, they cannot expect a harvest. The same is true of spiritual practice. It is not the grand declaration or the colorful initiation that means anything. It is the ongoing, daily living of a spiritual life that has meaning. Our progress may range from dull to spectacular, but we must accept both. Each and every day should be linked together, strung into a long line of prayer beads.
In life, you don’t know how many beads you’ve counted already, and you don’t know how many are yet to come. All that matters is fingering the one that comes to you now and taking the spiritual significance of that moment to heart.
“Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the repetition of ten thousand prayers” — Zoroaster
“Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day’s work.” — William Osler
“Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.”
— Benjamin Franklin
“Let not the enjoyment of pleasures now within your grasp, be carried to such excess as to incapacitate you from future repetition”
— Seneca
True spirituality is demonstrated in the way you live your life, not in going to church and repetition of prayers. Those things are mere reminders to live your life in the way you believe. The reality is that your spirit is most nourished or starved by the things that happen every day, how you treat those around you every day, what things you do daily to further your own spirituality. I was always far more impressed by the great things my mother did for other people than by the fact that she went to church every week. I learned more from her example of how to be there for other people than from going to church myself.
Beads, however, are pretty cool. My son and I recently got interested in beads at a wonderful bead store in Tucson, Beaucoup Congé. Ah, now there is a place one could have a spritual experience! He fell in love with the magnetic hematite, I fell in love with the copper pearls. Now we both want to do more beading, and a friend has offered to go with me and tour our local beading supply stores. And then there were the used bookstores – Bookman’s. Ah, a spiritual experience for sure! A huge bookstore as neat and organized as any Borders, with thousands and thousands of used books of all types. Mmmm….
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