Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Make a change: work is not apart from the sacred

A LiveJournal blogger writes about Thomas Moore's book Care of the Soul and her attempts to carve out time during mornings to attend to her soul:
"I found myself nodding when Moore wrote, 'Care of the soul is a continuous process that concerns itself not so much with 'fixing' a central flaw as with attending to the small details of daily life, as well as to major decisions and changes.' Those small details are the ones I struggle with the most. It’s easy enough for me to scrub down my kitchen once a week, but so much harder to keep it clean, to load the dishwasher and wipe down the counters before bed so that I can wake to a clean palette for my morning smoothie and coffee. I want to learn to cultivate beauty in my life, for beauty nourishes the soul. And I want to spend another series of mornings re-reading this book — I feel like I’ve only begun to glimpse the lessons it can teach me."
She mentions that her husband, an MBA student at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, refers to Moore's book in his blog post about spirituality in the workplace. After describing a conversation Moore had with a client recounted in Care of the Soul, the blogger writes:
 "Walking through the world with a sense of purpose and reverence is something I aspire to. But how could you bring that into some of the jobs I've had? There's nothing divine about accounts payable. That's the problem with inviting our soul into our work — it makes us notice, really notice, the impact of our actions. We all have more power than we realize in our daily lives — power to brighten or dim the world around us. Choosing to be spiritually present in our work might mean finally acknowledging the many little or big ways we each contribute to harming each other and the world around us. And maybe, just maybe, it would mean making a change."

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