The day is beautiful

This may very well be my final entry for a while. Certainly the last for a few weeks. 

The next big thing in noviciate life is a 'Vow Retreat' - 8 days of silence and prayerful reflection on whether this is the life for me. And so most certainly days without digital distraction. 

I've been trying to think of the things I will take from this pilgrimage experience, and there are many. But perhaps the most noticeable immediate difference during the pilgrimage, and something I will look to bring into my daily life, was the change of pace. There was one walk I did 3 times during the pilgrimage. The first week it took me one and a half hours, but by the final week it was taking me two and a half hours. And as my pace slowed, I began to take in more of what was going on around me: I became less focused on my little world and more open to this great big world.

As the words on the park bench say, in today's photo of the day, 'the trail is beautiful, be still'. More often than not, I've been missing beauty in my days, and in my life, because I've been focused on simply getting from A to B. 

A great blessing of the pilgrimage was to have time to stop, to pause, to wander, to go off route and in doing so, to open myself up to the new and unexpected, or even to simply open myself up. And so, as I take these next steps forward, my intention is to do them at a different pace - to be still, to be looking around, to savour more the often taken for granted people and places in my every day life, people and places where God is very much present too.