Many people I know are searching for a clearing…..a place where the world, their days, their lives open up and there is space to breath. Really breathe. Deeply. I hear it all the time. Tales of rushing from one things to another. Ways in which people express their 'failure' at being able to do it all, or at least all they feel is asked or required of them. Even writing these words causes my muscles to feel weighed down, heavy.

Last week as I listened to Barbara Brown Taylor talk about The Sacred Art of Stopping she used the phrase 'finding our way to the clearing.' I jotted it down quickly on the program I was holding in my hand. The phrase brought such openness in my chest, a deeper breath, a sense of longing.

I don't think I am alone in saying that the multitasking we all seem to be engaged in is killing me. Not literally, of course, but it certainly has a way of killing the spirit, doesn't it? The ways in which we are always 'on', always available, 24/7, 365 days a year. Instead of using the amazing technology we are privy to as a tool to help us live saner, fuller lives, to do our work with greater ease, we often use it to be connected 24/7, 365 days a week without rest.We need a way to find a clearing.

Mary Oliver wrote a poem I thought of when the image of this clearing was conjured up for me last week: I'd seen their hoof-prints in the deep needles and knew they ended the long night under the pines, walking like two mute and beautiful women toward the deeper woods, so I got up in the dark and went there. They came slowly down the hill and looked at me sitting under the blue trees, shyly they stepped closer and stared from under their thick lashes and even nibbled some damp tassels of weeds. This is not a poem about a dream, though it could be. This is a poem about the world that is ours, or could be. Finally one of them-I swear it!-would have come to my arms. But the other stamped sharp hoof in the pine needles like the tap of sanity, and they went off together through the trees. When I woke I was alone, I was thinking:so this is how you swim inward, so this is how your flow outward, so this is how you pray.

Each of us is waiting for the 'tap of sanity' from some hoof. Perhaps that tap must be self-imposed so we may swim inward, flow outward, and at long last, pray.