This week Awesome Stories brings you comfort, humanity’s choice, and wild faith.

Cultivating Comfort

Comfort can be found in the context of daily living. It is a grace. We just need to open our arms and receive it. ~ Colette Lafia

Comfort seemed like a nice contrast to all the heavy stories I’ve been sharing. Especially with Mother’s Day coming up tomorrow, we need to take time from our busy and challenging lives to find comfort and joy in ordinary life. Colette offers 7 Simple Ways to Cultivate Comfort as a spiritual practice for nurturing. She suggests we use these practices as a way to nurture and build relationships with friends, family, and community. Slowing down to take time for comfort and relationships seems like the foundation to me. She also suggests we create comfort within our home with food, decorations, and flowers. I do it with art and decorations that have meaning or bring me joy. Helping others find comfort is a beautiful way to ease another’s pain and provide practical compassion. And remember to build comforting routines into your daily life like enjoying your first breath, a sip of tea, or the sun shining in the window, etc. Enjoying flowers and nature are my go-to routines for comfort.

Choosing Connection

This generation is being pushed by an injured Earth and pulled by a welcoming Universe to make a monumental gift to humanity’s future. ~ Duane Elgin

Humans are facing a critical choice in both our evolution and that of the planet. We can continue to view the planet as a separate, material thing for us to harvest or a living holistic system that includes and embraces us. Intellectually, most of us agree with the idea of inter-connection, but us to survive and thrive, we must fully embrace our role as the awareness and leading edge of evolution. Our current choices are not sustainable for life on the planet. Humanity’s Urgent Challenge is an eloquent exploration by Duane Elgin of our role and choices in this game of life. As Duane passionately reminds us, we need to choose connection and step into our evolutionary role, working cooperatively to realize our bio-cosmic potential and live in harmony with the universe. Like Duane, I hope we choose love and connection, fully embracing our unique role and ability to help evolve the planet.

Wild Faith

In this thought-provoking article, Gennene Marie Haugen asks how do we hold both tragedy and magnificence in these times of great change. Her bottom line is a kind of wild faith born of deep reverence for the beauty of life. Like many, she sees the many tragedies and disasters of our times. But not enough of us, myself included, can embrace this great chasm and still find beauty and hope. She reminds herself of the evolutionary leaps that have happened before, often during times of great stress and change. And she holds a wild faith in the unseen cosmic forces that brought forth life and continue to play out. While Gennene continues to do environmental activism and what she can, she suggests that maybe the best thing we can do is use our imaginations to help build bridges to an unknown future. Humans seem to be the only species with the ability to imagine and bring forth alternate realities.

May your week be full of comfort, love and wild faith. Happy Mother’s Day!