Welcome to the second Words That Encourage newsletter, where I seek to “inspire with courage, spirit or hope”. I welcome your feedback – just hit reply.
i) Freedom In The Air
The felt sense of freedom is true-north for me. At important moments, the ‘inner experience’ of freedom acts as a radar for taking good decisions. This sense of freedom helps me to confront what is confining in my experience, and/or to seek a way through.
Freedom is true-north for me
What areas of my life are confining me? Which choice(s) will lead me to a greater sense of freedom?
ii) Light After Tragedy
On reading last week’s bit about encouragement, a friend wrote to me about tragedy and how it can affect and change us.
After tragedy, light appears distant. We can almost lose our trust in life. We may fear that things will always be this bad.
Those who have been there before us say: “Take heart!” We must mourn. Using what courage we have, we can speak with trusted friends.
In time, we can begin to hope that life will get a bit better. After a season of very dark nights, the sun’s light may indeed signal dawn. May it warm you to your very bones.
Francois Peron National Park, Western Australia
Recommendation: Listen to Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert’s extraordinary podcast episode on being “grateful for grief”.
iii) Inspired Music
God Moving Over the Face of The Waters (Reprise) by Moby and Víkingur Ólafsson – listen via YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Music.
Moby
This compelling piece was composed by electronic artist Moby for his first album some 30 years ago. Now re-recorded with an orchestra, Moby speaks about the inspiration behind the piece in a moving video about what happened during a 3am composition session:
At 3 o’clock in the morning in ’93 or ’94 I was listening back through the music and… there’s this quiet part, and when the crescendo came back in all of a sudden I just started crying. I was so taken with the emotion of the song and I had this vision… imagining God looking at earth, looking at the earth that’s covered in water, and moving over the face of the waters, and imagining all of the life that was going to come, everything that was going to happen. The single cells, the multicellular life, all of the pain that life involved, all of the joy that life involved, the births, the deaths, of trillions of organisms… I don’t know who God is, I don’t know what God is, but that vision of looking at the world with all of its life, and all of the suffering, but all of the joy, all of the longing, all of the fear, everything that surrounds life, everything that life is comprised of, everything involved in the process of life.
Moby
Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólaffson helps the music soar. I love Ólaffson’s Bach album (especially the organ sonata), and yet everything he plays is beautiful. It’s well worth exploring all his albums when you can.
Have a great weekend,James
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