Live with Intention: Remember and Do What Matters (Positive Affirmations, New Age Thought, Motivational Quotes) - Softcover

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Mary Anne Radmacher is a writer and an artist. She conducts workshops on living a full, creative, balanced life; teaches Internet writing seminars; and works with individual clients. She has been writing since she was a child, and she uses her writing to explore symbols and find meaning.

Among her special honors, she counts the respect of her peers and the friendship of children. She is the author of Lean Forward into Your Life and Live Boldly. She lives in the thriving university town of Gainesville, FL, in close proximity to amazing humans and fine dogs. Visit her online at www.maryanneradmacher.net.

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From Live with Intention:

Pay Attention

Pay attention to the synchronicity of the events in your life.  People have different names for those visiting signals, the signs, the synergies of our lives. I had a unique understanding of God when I was very young. It often amused my Sunday School teachers, and it got me in conflict with some of the adults in the small world that was the church around the corner from my home. I remember with fondness conceptual arm-wrestling matches of ideas with a cherished cousin who was a biblical scholar. I remember one holiday when we were sent to the kitchen, behind a door, because our discourse, which we found fascinating, was too loud and making some uncomfortable. My cousin took exception to my saying that my coming to know God was a magic carpet ride. But he understood the sense of wonder, he listened to the awe that the reference implied. In that awe, I said yes to GOoD and GOoDness and have been saying yes ever since. He demonstrated the capacity to rise above the language of his embraced doctrine and see and hear me. Because he allowed that, I did not have to speak of matters of faith in the same way he did. We were able to take different roads and meet at the same door. Listening hard makes that kind of compassionate understanding possible.

Origami as Metaphor for Listening Hard

The patterns, the visual unlikelihood, the stretching of one’s imagination as it asks, “A flat piece of paper did that?” The interconnectedness of the origami folds strikes me as symbolic of the complex layers and folds of our days. Crease, fold, severe straight lines, each flat fold building upon flat fold until shaken or the strength of a breath is applied. With breath or stretch, there is transformation. Another form is recognized. What was familiar in one iteration becomes a bird in flight, a box, or a flower. This brings to mind those aha moments―when all the murky, disconnected complexities line up in magnificent order to say, “Here. Listen and look. This is the lesson I have been creating for you. Here is this lasting, difficult beauty for your life.”

In learning to listen, we must be both gentle and fierce. We must be willing to see beyond what we expect and courageous enough to honestly hear what is being said and to believe what is being demonstrated.