Smaller Worlds, Bigger Lives

I’m starting to notice how disconnected people have become from the wellspring of beauty immediately available in their own lives.

You can almost see it in people’s eyes sometimes — a kind of drifting. Disconnected from their neighbors. Disconnected from the earth. Disconnected from themselves.

And when we become disconnected, life begins to feel isolated instead of gathered. Fragmented instead of whole.

The older I get, the more my heroes are changing.

They used to be the famous ones. The loud ones. The people in the spotlight.

Now, I find myself drawn to people who simply know how to live. People who tend gardens. People who devote 10,000 hours to something. People who wake slowly, pray honestly, cook beautiful meals, and pay attention to the sky.

I think one of the clearest ways to know whether we are connected to ourselves and our lives is to ask a very simple question:

Does my life feel chaotic and complicated right now?

Or does it feel simple and quiet?

Because chaos and complication almost always turn life into a battle.

Even the language we use reveals it. Everything becomes war. Fighting. Surviving. Defending. Overcoming.

I even notice it in many of the songs sung in churches now — songs about battles, enemies, warfare.

And maybe that says something about the state of our consciousness.

But what if life was never meant to be a battle?

What if it was meant to be a ballad?

Something to step into.
Something beautiful.
Something carefully composed and curated just for you.

I don’t think we’re going to find what we’re longing for on another screen or in the next vacation we book to escape ourselves.

I think we find it much closer than that.

In our own breath.
In the orchid, catching the morning sunlight.
In the cardinal’s spring song.
In a slow dinner with people we love.
In the sacred ordinary things we keep overlooking.

And maybe if we could fall back in love with our own small world, we would begin to experience lives that feel as wide as the universe.

To me, that’s what communion really means.

The word communion comes from the Latin communis —
“com” meaning together,
and “munis” meaning to share, exchange, or participate.

Communion is participation in life itself.

Not escape from it.

And I can assure you: you have two choices before you every single day.

One path is chaotic and complicated.
The other is simple and quiet.

One you will call a battle.

The other you will call a ballad.

Both are readily available.

So the question becomes:

Which one do you want?

Namaste,

Ashton