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Ripening Playfulness: Awake to Delight · Infinitely Precious

• 0:00
  Intro: Welcome to the Infinitely Precious podcast produced by Infinitely Precious LLC. Your host is James Henry. Remember, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.
• 0:11
  James: Hello, beloved. It's me, James, and it's another opportunity for us to be together here on the Infinitely Precious podcast. Thanks for being my companion. I hope that these opportunities we get to briefly share this time are fruitful for you. And if they are, that you would feel free to share this with others.
• 0:36
  As you might remember, we have been working our way through what I call the ripening dimensions of life, of being alive. And they are ripening because at any given time we are moving toward greater ripeness or away from greater ripeness. We might be at a place that seems pretty unripe in those given moments. And the root for the word good, I am told anyway in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, the root for that is ripe. So a lot of times that idea of ripening, of in a process, of moving towards something is what it's about.
• 1:27
  Now you remember, have nine, I have indicated nine and I have told you before, these are not exhaustive. You may have ones that pop up for you. They did not all come to me, the nine, all at once. I started with four, five, six, I think about six after I began to sort of distill some of the things I was thinking about. Seven and eight came along.
• 1:55
  And then within the last four or five months, maybe even more recently than that, I was sitting and I realized that for me there was one that was missing. And that's the one we're talking about today, the ninth ripening dimension, the ripening practice. That is ripening playfulness. I think there ought to be room. It seems to me there ought to be room in our lives for wonder, for awe, for joy, for play, for doing something just because we enjoy doing it.
• 2:33
  Yesterday afternoon, here in my house, after we had had lunch together, we played a family game, trekking the world. It's a wonderful game and an adventure, and you can never tell who's going to win or lose really until the very end of the game. And you learn things while you're doing it. And it doesn't have to be as an intensely competitive as some other things. But it was a lot of fun.
• 3:01
  And the three of us who were here to play it really enjoyed it. So there's room for play. There's room to just stop and delight when you hear the sound of a turtle dove outside your window or you watch a hawk or an eagle circling in the sky. When you sit on the beach and watch the waves roll in, there's something just wonderful, awesome, if you will, as you watch that very natural, very normal, everyday part of life and catch a glimpse of just how delightful it is when the sun glints just right. I was driving home.
• 3:48
  I was riding as my daughter drove us home the other day, a long distance trip we had made to see my family. And as we were driving back, there was a storm to the west of us and the sun was setting and all that you could see in just one little dark section of the sky was just like a little aura of orange, bright burnt orange right on the edge of the horizon as we crossed the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel in Hampton, Virginia. And there it was in the distance. And it was just awe inspiring. It touched something deep inside of me.
• 4:38
  There ought to be room in our lives, not just ought to be, but I think it s a core principle of our lives that we ought to be able to be open to wonder and playfulness. Sometimes we take ourselves and our theology and our way of looking at the world very, very seriously. Sometimes too seriously. And ripening playfulness is invitation to step back, to recognize that one aspect of the nine dimensions that I've named that could be six for you or 16, doesn't matter, that one of those dimension invites me to remember to just be joyful. When I see a bird in flight, when I hear a song, when I'm chatting with a friend, when I'm in the grocery store walking through the aisles and I catch a glimpse of something that I didn't even know existed.
• 5:47
  Any of those kinds of spaces in our lives are an invitation to find joy and to play. Life can be a serious thing. And there are certainly serious things that are happening all the time. Death and there's violence and all sorts of things that weigh heavily upon us. And I don't want to denigrate them in any way.
• 6:09
  But finding joy and playfulness and pleasant moments in our lives are a gift. They're a special gift. And it seems to me that the divine one who inhabits my life and all of our lives and all of the universe but is not that universe, is not that life, is both a part of, within, and other than is one who enjoys playfulness. Look at what the beautiful evolutionary process has brought to us in the way of such great diversity, so many different colors and shapes and sizes and movements, planets and galaxies beyond our imagination. And all of that, it seems to me, sort of denotes a playfulness, a playful spirit.
• 7:13
  I get great joy in talking to small children and playing with small children and reading to small children and taking walks with small children. I still get a little taste of delight in my life when I remember what it was like to walk with my own children or my nieces and nephews out on the sidewalk or in an open field and just seeing the things that drew our attention and the wonderment with which they engaged life. Where is the wonderment in our lives? Is it ripening? Is the joy of being alive Taking this breath, is it apart?
• 8:02
  Because there's certainly plenty of seriousness all around us all the time, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there ought to also in the midst for that be room for us to just find pleasure in our favorite milkshake flavor or a chocolate chip cookie that reminds us of home, reminds us of a different time in our life, time when perhaps when we felt more alive, safe, at home, whatever it may be. Those things that give us just a little taste of just how beautiful being alive is. So what I want to invite you to do at the end of every day, at least initially, look back on your day and ask the question, where did I find delight today? And if you didn't find any delight or even if you did, you can ask a second question.
• 9:17
  Where did I miss the delight that was right in front of my face? That first blossom of spring, that first bite of an apple just fresh off a tree or pineapple or whatever your favorite thing is, peanut butter. Whatever it may be, where did I find delight today? Where did I get so caught up in getting to the next thing that I missed the delight of that first bite of the sandwich or that first sip of my cup of coffee or tea or iced tea or Coke or whatever it may have been? Where did I miss the delight because I was already out of the moment?
• 10:05
  As you can see, you can begin to hear, if you've been listening to all the ripening dimensions of life that being attentive to the moment, ripening attention in any given moment, ripening presence in any given moment might give rise to noticing delight. They're interrelated. As you enter your day, a ripening intention to delight in those moments that come your way that offer you delight, to be awake to it. Ripening release, that opportunity to let go of the things that might keep you from being in the moment and delighting in the simple pleasures of life. So where did I experience delight today?
• 10:58
  Where did I miss the delight that was right in front of my face? And perhaps as you begin to ask those questions at the end of the day, you can also be intentional entering your day to look for the moments that might offer a bit of playfulness. Something you say to a friend in teasing, encouraging teasing, not negative teasing, just kidding around that brings a smile to their face, a little bit of delight, and in turn makes you giggle or laugh because you shared that moment of wonder, awe, delight, playfulness, that it seems to me is something we often miss in life. So I hope for you that you find some playfulness this week, And not just this week, but all the days going forward, may you ripen in playfulness. And I'm going to seek to do the same, try to be awake enough to catch a taste of that delight as it comes to me.
• 12:03
  Remember always, delight or not, whether you're experiencing it or only wishing you could, that you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are. Thanks for joining me today. Next week we will pick up on something new. We finished the ripening topics at least for the moment. So I wish you the best.