Time to Charge your Batteries!

Time to Charge your Batteries!

Doing nothing often leads to the very best of something. – Winnie the Pooh

Well folks, I am at a Franciscan retreat centre in Phoenix recharging my batteries. There is no smoke from forest fires here – only blue skies, hot sun, 100 F temperatures, lots of cactuses and a swimming pool to relax into. If you live in eastern Canada or eastern USA you just suffered through the trauma of breathing smoke from the Quebec forest fires and definitely need a time of rest to recover from that nastiness. All of us need time to charge our batteries. It can be days doing nothing at the cottage, or sleeping in and then napping at home. The Franciscan version of that is to pray and meditate and walk among Nature and just listen to the bees buzzing in tree so loudly that when you stand under the tree all you hear is BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ – which is exactly what I did this morning.

 

Why does this matter? You can only give what you have. If you have no energy because your are exhausted you cannot help your neighbour let alone try to save the Planet. Of course we all know this, but do we do it? All I am going have you consider this week, after the trauma of the forest fire smoke [which my wife suffered from and told me all about], is that you find a way to charge your batteries. Its just like the advice during the safety talk by the airlines; if the oxygen line drops down and you have a child – you breathe FIRST, then you pass the line to the child. You can’t help them if you are not thinking clearly. If we are exhausted physically or emotionally there is no chance that our actions will be as coherent as they could have been.

So, dear friends, I must leave you to spend some time in contemplation in a chapel among the cacti. I hope you can find the time to do something equally energizing. You may surprised that in this quiet time you will not only be energized by inspired but dream of possibilities that mere action could never imagine.