From My Reading - Sacred Time: Embracing An Intentional Way of Life

Tucked quietly behind an office building on a busy city street, is a quiet little park surrounded by stone walls. 

Lush with vines and a variety of ground coverings that thrive in the shade of a giant pine tree, a single picnic table

invites you to enjoy a moment of respite amidst the bustle of the busy world. It is an invitation to sacred time.

LEXINGTON, VA

"We live in a breathless world.  Everything around us seems to move at faster and faster speeds, summoning us to keep up. We multitask, we organize, we simplify; we do all that we can to keep on top of the many demands on our time. We yearn for a day with more hours in it so we can complete all that we long to do. This rushed and frenzied existance is not sacred time.

Sacred time is time governed by the rhythms of creation, rhythms that incorporate times of rest as essential to our own unfolding. Sacred time is time spent being present to the moments of eternity available to us whenever we choose to pause and breathe.

In sacred time, we step out of the madness of our lives and chose to reflect, linger, savor and slow down. We gain new perspective here. We have all had those moments of time outside of time when we felt as if we were touching eternity, bathed in a different kind of rhythm.  Touching eternity brings cohesion to our lives and reminds us of the goodness and surplus of living because it honors the rhythms of the soul.

The clock with its forced march is not the only marker of time. Our calendars with their five and ten year strategic plans rob us of our future as we desperately try to cram things in. Each slow, mindful breath, the rising and setting of the sun, the expansion and contraction of the moon, the ripening and releasing of the seasons - these mark a different quality of time and invite us into a deepened and renewed way of being."

- CHRISTINE VALTERS PAINTNER, from Sacred Time: Embracing An Intentional Way of Life