This eCourse is an invitation to answer the question…
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
This eCourse is for people who love life.
And, for people who wish to love life, but who are temporarily stymied.
Captive to busyness, disappointment, anger, exhaustion, apathy, excess of caution, or even a good reputation.
We carry around an unused life, as if life is a saving bond to be withdrawn only when mandatory.
People who are alive in their own skin stand out.
People who are alive in their own skin practice sacred necessities…
Amazement
Sanctuary
Grace
Stillness
Simplicity
Resilience
Friendship
Join me. Let us practice a few sacred necessities. Practice that opens the heart and rekindles the spirit. Practice that invites us to embrace the sacrament of the present moment.
And practice is everything. Theory is for people with too much time on their hand and a heavy dose of puritan guilt, leaving them with the notion that it is better to play the right notes than to hear the music.
These necessities—practices, ingredients—are sacred because they allow us to embrace the day, our life—this life—in all its fullness, with its disparities, its quirkiness, its demands, its unfairness, and its wondrous serendipities. These necessities are sacred because they do not lodge themselves on the surface of life. They enter into it, giving life its spice, its flavor its fullness, its richness, its punch, and its power.
These necessities are sacred because they allow us to embrace the day, our life—this life—in all its fullness, with its disparities, its quirkiness, its demands, its unfairness, and its wondrous serendipities.
We think of living a good life as some kind of western birthright. Such thinking becomes toxic when it is fueled by four thousand advertisements every single day telling us what to buy, or more realistically, what to feel guilty about, as if somehow, we missed the boat to success. It is a cultural full court press about what it means to be human, and we live in perpetual consternation over completing some list of expectations,
always wondering if we measure up.
In our fixation to find the answers, we miss… the small gifts of life, the serendipitous gifts of grace, and the presence of the holy, and the gentle doses of the sacred reflected in our everyday,
and extraordinarily ordinary world.
As Rabbi Harold Kushner reminds us, what we fear is coming to the end our lives and realizing that we never lived.
Why do we have all these feelings, dreams and hope if we don’t ever use them? That’s where Shirley Valentine disappoints. She got lost in all this unused life. I’ve fallen in love with the idea of living.
—From the Movie, Shirley Valentine
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. —Mary Oliver
Gasping… iris, sacrament of present moment
In this eCourse we will…
Find our everyday ordinary world, extraordinary.
See the sacred in the ordinary.
Touch moments of grace.
Embrace the sacrament of the present.
Know that we are part of what is sacred.
Receive permission to live at home in our own skin.
Learn to love this life.
Praise for Sacred Necessities
Come. Set aside your to-do lists for a. while and join Terry Hershey for some stories, quotations, musings and videos on this crazy, wondrous, mysterious, and grace-filled world we share. – Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice
Terry Hershey offers us seven wondrous sacred necessities for living life to the fullest. But he forgot one. eCourses like this, that wake us up to life before we die. – Leonard Sweet, Drew University
About Terry Hershey
Terry Hershey is an author, humorist, inspirational speaker, dad, ordained minister, golf addict, and smitten by French wine. He divides his time between designing sanctuary gardens and sharing his practice of “pausing” and “sanctuary,” to help us do less and live more. Terry’s book, Sanctuary: Creating Places For Grace In Your Life, offers the permission to slow down and to be gentle with ourselves, in a world that demands More-Bigger-Faster. Most days, you can find Terry out in his garden–on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound—because he believes that there is something fundamentally spiritual about dirt under your fingernails.
You can get sacred necessities now.
I’m here to support you on this journey and look forward to seeing sacred necessities in your life.
