MSI Press Blog

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie: -47-   In the school of life, difficult people are the faculty. They teach us our most important spiritual lessons, the lessons that we would be most unlikely to learn on our own.   Mark I. Rosen   Civility has outer work and inner work. The outer work, if not easy, is at least straightforward. You listen to people. You give them a chance to speak. You communicate that you’re enough interested in understanding them that you’re willing to hold off on coming at them with your own opinions or rejoinders. You allow the possibility of a seedling relationship to grow. The inner work can be more challenging. How are you going to position your heart so that you are able to reach out in civility to someone who feels like the enemy? The outer work of civility takes place in the realm of behavior; the inner work takes place in...

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie: -43-   Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there’s love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.   Ella Fitzgerald   Ella Fitzgerald, the “Queen of Song,” had a legendary career that spanned over half a century. Beginning in the early 1930s, she performed with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra and helped to form new styles in American popular music. She was noted both for her vocal and artistic range and for her remarkable improvisational ability. Reacting to the formulaic style of big band swing music, Fitzgerald was at the cutting edge of bebop, the jazz movement that turned away from prominent bass lines and featured extended improvisational solos from instruments like saxophone and clarinet or from the voice in the role of instruments. You can...

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie: -42-   We fail to use our powers when we fail to think of our lives and our work, whatever it is, as creative—as potential art, or “life art.”   Dan Wakefield   Creativity applies to all of life, not just the Arts. Wakefield goes on to give examples of a telephone operator singing greetings in answering the phone, of a business person seeing the possibilities of a new product, and of a yoga teacher’s creative guided meditation. This was the mid-1990s. I’m frankly not sure whether there are telephone operators anymore, but you get the idea. It is, as Wakefield says, “life art.” You have the ability to choose how you do what you do and to make even mundane daily activities into exercises in creativity. You can explore a different process of interaction in your committee meetings. You can tinker with your choices in clothing. You ...