The Greatest Gift

Daily writing prompt

What is the greatest gift someone could give you?

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The greatest gift possible arrives by no other means
than my own inner honoring to get to the bottom,
as much as I am able, of my own inner swamp,
so that I might arrive, at long last,
in the clarity of my own inner light.

I can think of no person who could do this for me,
for if they could, I surely would have discovered them
early on.

Arriving at the heart of this quest has taken years,
for there is no shortcut. There is only awareness—
allowed, then revealed—of the source of my own suffering.

Nobody else has ever known its depths. Nobody ever could.
Each of us is mired in unfathomable layers of deception.
It is the way we move forward in life that too often asks
more of us than we are able to give.
Nobody’s fault.

Life here on Earth requires attention in too many directions
for one person to possibly attend to. And so we learn stillness—
if we honor its importance—so that we might discover calm
amidst the daily storms that assault our finer senses.

We learn about ourselves first. Then we are able to develop
a deep alliance with others of our kind, for we know the difficulty
of moving through challenge. This alliance is called compassion.

It is not something we receive because we want to.
We earn it by acknowledging not only our light,
but our deepest denials and disgraces—
emotions we would rather not feel, and so we sideline them
in the deepest vaults of our being.

But there is always a reckoning. You know this
if you have lived long enough. Then the process becomes one
of unclenching, of uncovering, of discovering the hidden miseries
that plague us all.

And then—using our cultivated hearts—we learn to love ourselves
enough into wholeness. Into peace.

Mahukona ~ bj 2026

The Limits of My Bandwidth

(Inspired by Richard Rohr)

There comes a time in every life when our usual strengths no longer carry us—
when the mind loses its grip,
the heart grows tired of rehearsing old stories,
and the body itself whispers, No more.

We call these moments crisis, heartbreak, bad timing, bad luck.
But sometimes—if I am honest—they are simply 
the limits of my bandwidth, the place where everything
I have relied on finally admits it cannot take me any farther.

Richard Rohr calls this a spiritual law:
We must be led to the limits of what we can do,
or we will never discover the deeper Source
waiting beneath what we think of as “me.”

I have lived long enough to know the truth in this.

The ego is a loyal guard dog—
it will insist it can handle anything
long after the roof has blown off the house.
It resists surrender with a kind of panic,
certain that letting go will mean disappearance.

But pain – real pain – the kind that brings us to our knees—
teaches a different truth.
It shows us that descent comes first,
that humility is not humiliation,
and that losing control is often the only doorway
into a more spacious life.

Rohr defines suffering as “whenever you are not in control.”
How simple, and how devastatingly true.

I think of all the times life defeated me
just enough to soften what needed softening:
the endings I didn’t want,
the rare moments when my body whispered, ‘not today,’
the daughters who had to walk their own labyrinths,
the friendships that dissolved when I stopped over-functioning,
the years I wrote alone with no audience,
the choices that exiled me from versions of myself
I had outgrown without knowing.

Each time, I reached the end of what my ego could manage,
and each time something quieter stepped forward—
a deeper intelligence,
a steadier presence,
a realism not rooted in cynicism
but in finally seeing life as it is.

We don’t choose these thresholds.
They arrive on their own calendar.
But if we allow them, they become initiations.

Because when we are no longer in control,
we are no longer pretending.
And without the performance,
something honest enters.

Call it God, call it grace, soul, Source, the ground of being—
what matters is not the name,
but the way it feels:
like relief,
like truth,
like the world finally widening
after years of narrowing ourselves to survive.

I used to think strength meant holding everything together.
Now I know strength is what rises
after everything has fallen apart
and you are still here, breathing, awake, real.

The limits of my bandwidth were never limitations.
They were thresholds—
the place where the real story finally begins.

~ ocean road, bj 2025

What Rises After

Humility may be the ultimate—
the quiet mastery that arrives
only after a lifetime of learning
what strength is not.

But to be sure,
humility is not humiliation.
It is not a breaking,
not a shaming,
not the collapse of a self
that tried its best to stay upright.

Humiliation wounds.
Humility opens.
One shrinks the soul;
the other makes room for it.

Humility comes when the scaffolding falls—
when control slips from our hands,
when certainty dissolves,
when life insists we meet it as it is
instead of how we rehearsed it.

And in that tender aftermath,
if we dare to stay present,
something steady begins to rise:
clarity without rigidity,
softness without surrendering power,
a groundedness that needs
no armor to hold its shape.

Humility is not a fall from grace.
It is the grace that appears
when the falling is over.

It is the breath we didn’t know we were missing,
the quiet that gathers beneath effort,
the truth that waits
under every illusion of control.

Humility does not undo us.
It reveals us—
and in that revelation,
we finally begin to live
without pretending.

~ Wood Valley, bj 2016

Under a Billion Stars

We step outside just before dawn,
the air cool enough to taste the recent
and generous winter rains.
Billions of stars scatter across inky black,
so many I imagine them
as a silver faerie mantle
draped lightly over the flowing crown of Mother Earth.

I name a few—ones learned long ago,
small anchors from another life.
Chris stands beside me, lengthening his spine,
awakening his body into the imminent day,
and says quietly, It really does put things into perspective.

I nod, feeling the smallness he means—
not as despair, but as relief.
As if the sky itself had exhaled,
and we finally remembered
how to breathe with it.

Beyond what we can see,
the universe keeps unfolding,
layer upon layer,
each pulse of light a reminder
that we belong here—
part of something far greater
than our own small radiance
returning its shimmer to the whole.

~ NASA Hubble photo

Servant or Master?

Daily writing prompt

What’s something you believe everyone should know.

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What everyone should know is not a list of facts,
but a way of being with the unknown;
that questions are not enemies of truth,
they are invitations.

That thinking is not the same as reacting;
and silence is not ignorance,
but the pause where wisdom gathers.

That what we believe today
is only a stepping stone
meant to be outgrown.

That research is not about proving a point
but finding the courage to be changed
by what we learn.

That the mind is a marvelous servant
but a poor master,
and the heart — the quiet, patient heart —
has been waiting all along
to join the conversation.

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