Today I was in a conversation when one person used “discernment” and another person confessed not knowing what discernment meant. Considering it was the second day in a row a term I don’t think about much popped into a conversation I knew I needed to spend a few minutes tossing the meaning around.
I couldn’t just offer a trite, under done answer. IN that circumstance, no one gets any better.
The power of discernment is like a vat of wine aging just enough or a batch of chocolate chip cookies straddling the line between just the right amount of gooey and the perfect assemblage of crunchy.
The gooey may be seen as the ability to quiet oneself enough to hear the music accompanying the heartbeat. Sometimes it is just the rhythm or the beat, other times it may be the surprising throughline and other times a lyricist’s sweet contralto floats across the barriers we often raise up between one another.
The crunchy though – in the oven for the tiniest speck of time longer at perhaps the smallest nth of a degree higher brings the cookies of discernment to hearing and then understanding.
Actually eating the cookie and nodding your head in joy at the taste and texture and sharing the cookie – even if one wants the entire thing – that is the fully flowing power of discernment. Hearing and understanding and sharing what we’ve heard and understood and perhaps then seen and deepened and yes, acted upon whether or not it made sense to anyone except for ourselves.
The folks who do this are the inventors, the change makers, the ones others look at with their left eye scrunched up and their ride eye still. “What is she up to now?” the left eye asks, usually with distaste.
The right eye says, “I’m not going to miss a thing because I know the surprise more than likely will taste good.
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This blog post was inspired in part to this question from the #SpiritChat Twitter Chat hosted each Sunday morning by Kumud Ajmani (@AjmaniK on Twitter) . I’ll be responding to the questions throughout the week as a way to “keep up” with the chat I’ve been sleeping through lately because Sunday at 6 am is sometimes just a little bit too early for me.
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Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books,
Here I am writing by the graveside of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women – a highly successful book that hasn’t been out of print for more than 100 years.
performances and simply being herself out in the world. She is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people’s creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in soon!
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
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