"Gather yourself up. Then -- with attention no longer frittered amongst the petty accidents and interests of your personal life, but poised, tense, ready for the work you shall demand of it -- stretch out by a distinct act of loving will towards one of the myriad manifestations of life that surrounds you: and which, in an ordinary way, you hardly notice unless you happen to need them. Pour yourself out towards it, do not draw its image towards you. Deliberate -- more, impassioned -- attentiveness, an attentiveness which soon transcends all consciousness of yourself, as separate from and attending to the thing seen. As to the object of contemplation, it matters little. From Alp to insect, anything will do, provided that your attitude be right: for all things in this world towards which you are stretching out are linked together, and one truly apprehended will be the gateway to rest."
And, from THE AWAKENING CALL by James Finley, a word for mothers (outer and inner!):
A mother is at home trying to pray while her small child is playing on the floor near her feet.The child's constant movements, its requests to be helped now with this toy, now with another, are a continual distraction to her.At the level of ego consciousness, the child is an obstacle to her attempts to recollect herself in prayer.
But then, by God's grace, she looks at the child in solitude, she sees the child through the eyes of the love that impels her to pray. Is it that her awareness of the child incarnates the divine awareness in which God eternally beholds the child in the depths of his unfathomable love? Is it that in this moment she is given to realize that this child incarnates all that Christ is? She cannot say. But for a moment, she gazes at her child, and this simple gaze of love becomes her prayer. It is in eternity that she repents of her blindness in reaching out to touch the child's face. It is with humility that she acknowledges her foolishness in seeing only an obstacle to God, in this child so fraught with the divine. For in this vowed moment the beauty of the child's presence touches her, wounds her, silences her with the beauty of God's presence. And in this bonding with her child in the love of God, prayer spontaneously stirs within her.