valleys and hilltops

If any of your dreams has appeared to end in disappointment, don’t throw it away! Receive it now into your sacred space, and let it show you how the experience of that disappointment has also shaped the years which followed. Probably, if you can distance yourself from the immediate pain of it, you can begin to notice how that difficult time has helped to form you into who you really are, more surely than the easier conquests might have done. In whichever direction the flames of a particular burning bush have directed you, the years which followed have been a crucial stage of your personal “becoming”. They are part of the realization of your inner dream. One of the great gifts of your hilltops is that of perspective. The world looks different from the top of a hill. The sweat and struggle of each little field of effort is seen to be part of a much larger landscape. The failed crop of one year becomes the nourishment for the growth of the next season. — Margaret Silf, Sacred Space