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.

Hello, beloved. It's me, James, and it's good to be with you this week. I'm so happy that you joined me on the podcast, on this weekly podcast from Infinitely Precious. And I encourage you, if you find this brief podcast that I do on a weekly basis helpful, that you share it with others, encourage others to listen to it too. We try to do our best to make this an uplifting and encouraging time of sharing, time to share some thoughts about the world, about spiritual perspectives.

And so I just invite you to share it if it s meaningful to you. It is good to have you with me. I am thankful for those of you who do listen. Try my best to be thankful for everyone, but I'm certainly thankful that you're one of my listeners. So thanks for listening.

Today I wanted to take an opportunity to talk about what I call spirit whispers. It's a you can call it lots of different things, but there are moments when I find myself especially in tune in that moment to whatever is going on around me. You might call me truly awake in that moment, or perhaps I'm grounded, centered in that moment, and something speaks to me. Often it's in nature, but it could be just a phrase or a word in a song I'm listening to on the radio. It could invite deeper reflection about what's going on in the world, who I am as a person or otherwise.

Those could all be seen as spirit whispers. You may want to call it your own thing, whatever it is, but for me it s called spirit whispers. At least I coined that phrase for myself. So the other day I was sitting looking out my front window. Sometimes in the morning, when I get my second cup of coffee while Linda and Josh may have left the house and be headed to work, or I might be drinking my second cup of coffee while I m waiting for them to say goodbye to me or whatever, I look out the front window while I'm drinking that coffee and I just try to gaze without any judgment about what's going on in the world.

And just across the street from where I live now, there is this tall tree. It's got a couple of dead limbs on it. And as I was looking at one of the dead limbs, it had no leaves on it obviously, and I was like, I couldn't tell, but something was just a little bit off about it. I could tell something was maybe moving, but I couldn't tell what it was, until there were two, until in a moment while I was watching and taking a sip of coffee, two beautiful hawks. One swooped down and went off towards the left of my viewing area, which is toward the east, and one came directly towards our front window, we have a big picture window in the front of the house in the Parsonage where we live, and it swooped down and then came up right above the roof of the house and flew away.

And I was just in awe as I sat there. There was no particular feeling about it in the sense that I wanted to place any judgment on it. It was just beautiful to be present and see not just one, but two hawks together, and I had not seen two hawks together before in the neighborhood. You know, maybe on the nature channel or some video I was watching, or when I was out and about, but here it was a first. And as I just sat odd for a moment, I just was deeply thankful, first of all, to catch a glimpse of nature here in the midst of a fairly urban setting that I live in, that nature makes a way.

Wherever it is, life makes a way to be alive. And as I saw, I had seen those two hawks swoop off in different directions, it sort of set me thinking about what they might have been doing. My imagination came into being. And I was thinking about how they sort of developed perhaps m not a hawk, I don know about their higher order thinking. I know that they re conscious beings.

I don know what level of consciousness perhaps they have. But I thought to myself how they might have been dividing up the tasks that needed to be done. Perhaps it's not the time of year when they would be feeding young, I don't think, but perhaps they were headed in different directions to gather food or to search for prey in different places. Perhaps when they travel together, it's harder to find enough food for both of them. So they head in different directions.

And I thought how working in teams makes a difference in our world. We tend to see ourselves as individuals apart from everything else, and yet each one of us is fully a part of all that is going on around us, all that is happening in the universe in this moment. We are a part of that. We are a piece of that. We are a part of the continuity, the singularity of all that is.

We are individuals within that singularity, but nonetheless part of that larger piece. And so I thought about participating in it potentially in the way these two hawks behaved and went in different directions. Perhaps they just like different directions. Perhaps they were old friends, not a couple, and they were just hanging out before they both went back to their separate nests. These are questions I don't know the answer to.

But in my imagination, I connected them, I saw them as a pair, and I saw it as a tremendous gift that here in this setting, here were two hawks in the neighborhood together and how well they camouflaged, blended in, until they didn't anymore when they took off and took flight. Being it began to make me feel like a part of the nature in which I live. This place that I find myself in this moment, in this time. I mean, whispers all sorts of subtle messages of belonging and love and hope to me in moments when I need it most. And as I recollect about that particular morning, I didn't have any particular feeling about the morning as it begins.

Just on my second cup of coffee. Perhaps I didn t have enough of the caffeine stimulant in my body or not. I can t speak to that. But there was just a gift that actually I carried through the rest of the day, and it drew me into a kind of wonder and awe. And when we have spirit whispers happen in our lives and we get caught in moments of wonder and awe, it seems to me that those moments kind of open us up.

Imagine that we're re kind of in our moments when we re just completely self focused, that we re sort of closed off in some ways to connecting. And in moments of awe and wonder, I felt sort of an opening to receive the wonder of the universe, the subtle messages that the divine may speak into me. And suddenly I found myself aware throughout the rest of the day of the beauty of the earth around me. I went into my office that morning, I opened the window. It was a nice enough day that I opened the window at my office, you know, just away from here.

I felt the breeze, I listened to the bird, I felt more connected to all that is. I remembered I m a part of nature as much as any creature I see out my window, and s a gift to be a part of it all, what a gift it is to be alive. All of this was born to me as a gift from looking out my front window and catching the glimpse of two hawks as one swooped over me and flew away above the house and one swooped off to the east from the same perch, surprising me in the moment. And I think oftentimes that s how spirit whispers work. One moment we just are awake enough or we're present enough, we're there enough that it speaks to us.

Spirit can surprise us. It takes surprise because I think we re pretty insulated. We look for all these rational things and measurable realities. Re very empirical in our approach to life sometimes. Doesn't leave a lot of room for on wonder about the miracle we are, about all the atoms and molecules and tinier particles we don't even have names for perhaps yet, that make up our bodies.

How every moment is a new arising. How every breath is a gift. How every heartbeat is a gift. How even having these thoughts for me is to me a gift. And perhaps to you, it's the same.

Hearing these words might invite you to simply be present in the moments you can. Really be present in the moment. Be awake to the world around us. I think that's what Jesus meant when he kept telling his asking his disciples to stay awake, to keep awake, to be ready, because we don't know when we might be surprised. If we re sleeping through it, and many of us sleepwalk through life, we re sleeping through it, we miss it.

I think God, the divine spirit wants to speak into our lives all the time if we but listen. Well, that was my thought for this week. Thanks again for joining me. So delighted to have you with me. Until the next time, I wish you all the best and remind you, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.

Until the next time.