Where have I been lately?

I've been standing in line at the local coffee stop/ looking for a different coffee stop ...

It seems as though I have made myself too busy to think much less have time to sort through my thoughts here on TN ... it seemed like a good idea at the time, now I realize I am over committed. The sky is magnificently blue today ... I notice that for the first time six hours away from dawn.  It's that kinda busy, the too busy.  I'm trying to delete or move things off of my phone that I don't want to see now.  I came across these two notes, both from 2014 ... they go together.

"The business of life is the acquisition of memories.  In the end that's all there is."

~Mr. Carson/Downton Abbey)

"Often we don't even discover them as memories until years later when they emerge, not as they were,but as they have become as ours souls expand enough to value what we thought at the time was dross as the real gold of our lives." ~GVdL (Dust in the Wind)

Also recently noted in passing ... "Your soul is the face you had before you were born." ~Richard Rohr.  Interesting idea, I thought. 

Why does that name seem familiar ? ... I wondered ... he is the author of Falling Upward.

" Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of life, but the whole thesis of this book is exactly the opposite. What looks like falling down can largely be experienced as "falling upward." In fact, it is not a loss but somehow actually a gain, as we have all seen with elders who have come to their fullness. 

• Explains why the second half of life can and should be full of spiritual richness
• Offers a new view of how spiritual growth happens?loss is gain
• Richard. Rohr is a regular contributing writer for Sojourners and Tikkun magazines

This important book explores the counterintuitive message that we grow spiritually much more by doing wrong than by doing right--a fresh way of thinking about spirituality that grows throughout life." Amazon Review.

I think our soul may begin it's "life" journey as the face you had before you were born and more, perhaps it is the face which wishes to be "seen" by others, maybe that's how we "connect", maybe we "feel" seen by people who become significant. And more ... It seems more relevant to me that our soul is the face, or true self, that we create with the choices we make as we encounter chance and circumstance.  Our soul grows, or more poetically stated by Vanderleun, expands ... Our soul expands (hopefully expands, because it seems that I have seen souls contract) ... 

Our soul expands to accommodate the face one faces God with.  

Some (and maybe all)  memories are mementos of the refining process ... as we are refined by the refiner's fire ... .

Malachi 3 (NIV)

This is LB ... he was away from home for several days.  Yesterday he came home - to eat and sleep.  I think I know what he has been up to ... .