To Be Alive

What greater praise can I give you than to call you green? Green, rooted in light, shining like the sun that pours riches on the wheeling earth; incomprehensible green, divinely mysterious green, comforting arms of divine green protecting us in their powerful circle. And yet, lady, you are more than ever the noblest green, for you glow red as breaking dawn, you shine whte as the incandescent sun. Splendid virgin, none of our physical senses can explain or comprehend you.

--Christian poet Hildegarde of Bingin, Item de Virginibus

...this world's beauty is not antithetical to the spiritual life, but rather enhances and expresses it.

It is all too easy to sit here and say that this is obvious. How can I live a full and balanced spiritual life if I am going around with my eyes closed on the physical world. It would be just the same as trying to live in the real world while all the time dwelling in the spiritual.

I've made that mistake... more times than I should. More times than I care to remember. Trying to live more in one realm than the other - usually trying to live more spiritually, which really doesn't work. I suppose, means that I haven't learned that lesson very well - that balance is paramount.

Intellectually, perhaps, I have - I'm reciting it here as advice, am I not? But that doesn't mean that I live what I preach. I know that the best kind of life it one in which you life fully in the physical world while maintaining an open awareness of the spiritual. In other words, by being fully present in my life I am able to enhance my spiritual world. I must be present in both.

In practise I swing between struggling to live in either. Lately I feel as if I'm feeling the effects of that and so need to find a balance. Time to put my conviction where my words are... in more things that this, in more ways than one.