Toni Stone
401 Buck Hollow Rd
Fairfax, VT 05454
“take the first step in faith. you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just the first step.”
-Martin Luther King
May 6, 2007
changing is still a process
when Walt Whitman said, “there is never any more heaven or hell than there is now.
i know he was familiar with the little huge overcomings that have to happen,
so many every day.
there are too many wrinkles, not enough coffee, paper seven inches thick on the desk, bills to pay, tax auditors to see,
escalated numbers on the scale and an unwelcome spring chill in the air.
those are the days, when rising from the dead is a personal problem, not a story from some book.
those are the days when the first step out of it is a self inflicted miracle.
those are the days we’ve learned to thank monkey mind
for sharing everything that’s wrong from the edge of the bed
to the shower curtain in true speed-talk timing. If you accepted invitations to depression,
it’s yours before the first drop of shower.
the first step in faith would be the power to turn off the review of what’s not going right and tune into what was fine.
maybe you did order a hot fudge sunday, but you only ate half of the top.
maybe you are not the queen of aerobics this week, but you bought new workout shoes.
maybe your books are not selling a million a week, but you are still writing and
what got printed keeps moving. . .that’s where to look.
look where the encouragement is, not where discouragement lurks.
we are taking small steps this is true, yet it does not minimize
the long term commitment that our changing is. .little by little, we keep stepping out unable to see the whole set of steps, but this is reforming habits. ..
what has taken us over by tiny degrees, must be edged out the same way.
no matter what judgments monkey mind tosses our way, changing is still a process.
