A Spiritual Break

Posted on September 4, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

The Leash by the Door

The Leash by the Door

I could not put the leash away.

Everything else I managed. The bowl went into a cupboard. The collar went into a drawer, which is where these things go, apparently, when you cannot bear to throw them out and cannot bear to look at them either. But the leash stayed on its hook by the door for a long time after Flame died, and I walked past it every day, and I did not touch it.

What undoes you is not the grand thought. It’s the particular place on the floor that catches the afternoon sun, where nobody lies anymore. It’s the sound your ears go on listening for weeks after there is nothing left to make it. I sat down eventually to write a prayer for her, thinking it would be a small thing. It was not a small thing.

What Flame Left

I have written before about the Spiritual Footprint — the mark our lives leave on other people, the thing we carry out of the room after we have gone. I have written about it almost entirely in terms of humans. Our words, our tone, our patience or the lack of it. The gap between who we believe ourselves to be and what others actually experience from us.

I had not thought carefully about the fact that a dog leaves one too. And when you look at it directly, something uncomfortable becomes clear. The animal’s footprint might be cleaner than ours. (Metaphorically, that is; dogs do leave real footprints!)

Here is why. Most of what makes the human Spiritual Footprint difficult is the distance between intention and effect. I meant well. I was tired. I had my reasons. All true, and none of it reaches the other person, who received only what actually arrived. That gap is where most of our spiritual work lives.

Flame had no gap.

She was not managing an impression. She had no strategy, no reputation to protect, no version of herself she was hoping you would believe. She did not measure my failures or keep an account of my absences or love me less on the days I deserved less. She met me at the door as though I had been gone a hundred years, when in fact I had been at the dentist for two hours.

She left behind exactly what she was. And what she was, was glad I came back.

Why It Hurts This Much

People are sometimes embarrassed by how hard they grieve an animal. They say it apologetically. I know it’s just a dog. They will grieve a pet more openly than they grieved an uncle, and then feel obscurely guilty about it.

I don’t think there is anything to apologize for, and I think the reason is worth naming.

For many of us, that animal was the one relationship in which our own footprint did not have to be managed. She did not need us to be interesting. She had no opinion about our career. She was not tracking whether we had become the person we said we would become. We could come home defeated and be received without assessment — and for a great many people, that is the only place in their entire life where that happens.

We are not grieving a pet. We are grieving the one witness who never once required us to explain ourselves.

That is not a small thing, and it deserves better than “it’s just a dog.”

St. Francis Saw This First

Francis wrote the Canticle of the Creatures near the end of his life, mostly blind, in considerable pain, in a small, dark hut. He was not out on a hillside feeling pleasantly moved by nature. He was in trouble, and from inside that trouble he called the sun his brother and the moon his sister, and he meant it in the plain sense — not as a poetic flourish, but as a family claim.

That is the part people miss. Brother Sun and Sister Water are not decoration. They are a statement that the created world is not scenery for the human drama. It is kin. And a Franciscan does not have to squint to see why the household dog belongs on that list. She is not a possession, not an accessory to our life. She is a creature, made by the same hand, carrying the same signature.

There is a line in the Canticle about Brother Fire, whom Francis praised as beautiful and playful and robust and strong. I did not name my dog with the Canticle in mind. I named her Flame because of her coat. It was years before I noticed that Francis had already written her description, eight hundred years early, and got it exactly right.

This is why, every year around the fourth of October, we take the blessing outdoors.

It has to be outdoors, and not only for the obvious reasons. Dogs bark straight through the prayers. Leashes braid themselves together while their owners pretend not to notice. Somebody’s cat sits in a carrier at the far end of the lawn, refusing, on principle, to look at anyone. A child arrives holding a hamster the way you would carry the Blessed Sacrament, and someone else has brought a goldfish in a bowl of cloudy water and is holding it up with enormous seriousness. No homily survives it.

And it is entirely, unembarrassedly right; because for one morning, under the open sky where the Canticle was born, we stop pretending that the sacred begins where the animals leave off.

The Prayer

Here is what I finally wrote for her. I offer it in case someone reading this needs it. You may put your own animal’s name where hers is.

Lord God, Most High, All-powerful, All-good —

Praised be you through Brother Sun,

who warmed the place on the floor where Flame used to lie,

and through Sister Moon, who kept watch with us

through the last of the long nights.

We come to this threshold carrying small things:

a collar, a bowl, a leash by the door,

the sound our ears still listen for

and no longer hear.

Praised be you, Lord, for the creatures.

Francis called them brother and sister

and meant it plainly, without embarrassment —

Brother Wolf, who was hungry and not evil,

Sister Lark, who sang the day open,

the fish returned to the water,

the animals who came to him

because he did not come to them armed.

Praised be you through Brother Fire,

beautiful and playful and robust and strong,

whose name she carried without ever being told,

and whose warmth she left in the rooms she passed through.

You gave us a companion who never once

asked us to be more than we were.

Who did not measure our failures,

or keep an account of our absences,

or love us less on the days we deserved less.

Who met us at the door

as though we had been gone a hundred years,

and taught us, without a single word,

the whole grammar of welcome.

Praised be you through Sister Water, who quenches her thirst.

Through Mother Earth, who receives what she has given

and asks nothing for the keeping.

Through Sister Bodily Death, whom Francis blessed

and did not fear —

for she came gently to Flame, and we were allowed to be present,

and love was the last thing in the room.

We do not ask you to explain this.

We ask only that you receive Flame back

into the same creation that made her,

your first and still-speaking language,

where nothing you have loved is ever wasted

and nothing you have made is ever lost to you.

And send us out again into that creation

carrying what she placed in us

before we had a name for it:

her patience, her gladness, her uncomplicated presence,

her footprint on the quiet floor of our lives.

May what we held in our hands

be held now in our living.

Through Christ, who is the mirror and the light,

the bread and the dawn,

the space between and the One who fills it.

Amen.

What She Was Teaching

People ask me whether their animals are in heaven. I am not going to pretend to have an answer I do not. What I will say is that the Franciscan instinct runs entirely against the idea that God makes something, loves it, and then discards it — and that instinct is older and steadier than my opinion.

But there is something closer to hand that I am sure of.

Whatever Flame was doing all those years, she was demonstrating the practice in front of me daily and for free. She noticed. She paused at the door. She responded — always with her whole body, never with a calculation. And she did it again the next morning, and the morning after that, for as long as she had.

Notice. Pause. Respond. And then … Repeat.

Long before I ever had language for Sacred Noticing, it was being practiced in my house by a creature who could not spell.

So when you bring your animal out to be blessed this October, or when you stand at the memorial for one who has already gone — do not apologize for the size of your feeling. You are not being sentimental. You are recognizing kin. And you are grieving a creature who did, effortlessly and without a single thought about it, the thing you and I spend our whole lives trying to learn.

Flame never once wondered what she was leaving behind. That is precisely how she left so much.

Reflection derived from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

Posted on August 1, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

A boy, a stone and a Pond

A boy stood at the edge of a pond, choosing a stone.

Not the flattest one. Not the one that would skip farthest or make the biggest sound. He turned it over twice. He decided something private about it. Then he let it go.

Asked why that one. He shrugged. “It just felt right.”

He never watched where it landed. By the time the rings were spreading, he was already bent over, looking for the next one.

I have thought about that boy many times.

Because most of us do the opposite. We throw the stone and then we stand there, counting circles. We drop a word, a kindness, a hard conversation into the water, and we wait for the ripples to tell us whether it mattered. Did it reach the far shore? Did anyone see the splash? Was it enough?

Here is what I believe, and you may not agree with me. Everything we do is a spiritual act. Everything. There is no neutral surface on this pond. There is no throw that lands nowhere. Every word, every silence, every small decision made in a kitchen or a car or a hallway sends something outward, and that something touches lives we may never meet. We sort our days into what counts and what doesn’t. The water makes no such distinction. It receives everything.

And here is the strange part. We already know this. Something in us knows it before we act. In the half-second before the words leave, before the hand moves, something inside has already registered: this will land somewhere. On someone.

That knowing has a name. It is called intention.

Intention is the part of the throw no one else ever sees. The person on the far shore receives the ripple. The tone, the timing, the visible act. What they never receive is the inside of your hand at the moment of release. Why you did it. What you hoped. Whether the kindness was whole, or carrying a second, smaller motive underneath.

But unseen is not absent. The intention travels with the stone. It is stitched into the act the way the boy’s private decision was stitched into that particular stone. The pond never knew why he chose it. He knew. And somehow, that was enough to change the throw.

Sit with that for a moment, because it opens in two directions at once.

The first is freedom. If intention is real even when no one sees it, then the worth of what you do is not decided on the far bank. The kind act that went unnoticed lost nothing. The apology that was misread lost nothing. The love was in the release, not the reception. You can stop standing at the water’s edge, waiting for permission to call your throw worthwhile. It already was.

The second direction is harsher. If intention travels unseen, then all of it travels. The motive we thought we tucked inside a generous gesture does not stay hidden in any way that matters. It bends the throw. You have felt this from the other side. The gift that somehow asked something of you. The compliment with a hook in it. No one explained it. You just knew. Intention leaks. It always has.

Mystics have a word for the alternative. Purity of intention. Not purity as perfection. None of us throws a clean stone every time. Purity as singleness. One motive, not three. Doing the thing for its own sake. The mystics went further and said: for God alone. Which is another way of saying that when the heart is single, the outcome can be released the instant the stone leaves the hand. What happens next belongs to the water. It was never ours.

The boy will never know what his stones did. Ten thousand throws he never watched land. And something in him will stay light because of it. Not because the ripples didn’t matter. Because he trusted them to the water.

So do we. Or so we could.

Pause for Thought: Before your next word or act, don’t ask whether it will be seen. Ask what is actually in your hand.

This week, notice the half-second before you speak. That small interior moment when the intention forms. Don’t judge what you find there. Just notice it. Then throw the stone as cleanly as you can, and trust the rest to the One who receives every ripple, even the ones we never watch land.

Peace and all good, Michael

Reflection derived from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

Posted on July 17, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

The Weather You Bring

The Weather You Bring

A Spiritual Break Reflection

A few years ago, at a conference, a man came up to me and said, “You probably don’t remember me.”

He was right. I didn’t.

He had worked at my company, three levels removed in the organizational hierarchy, back when I still thought leadership was mostly about decisions. He told me that one afternoon, in a hallway, I had stopped and said to him: “I heard what you said in that meeting this morning. Don’t stop saying things like that.”

Then he told me what those two sentences had done. He had been planning to go quiet, he said. To keep his head down like everyone else. Instead, he kept speaking up, and speaking up became his career, and now he runs a company of his own, and he tells his people the same thing in hallways.

I have no memory of saying it. None.

Twelve words, spoken in passing by a man thinking about something else, carried for twenty years by a man who built part of his life on them.

That is the strange arithmetic of leadership. We assume our impact lives in the big things — the strategy, the reorganization, the decision we lost sleep over. Those matter. But they are often the smallest part of what we leave behind. The larger part is unrecorded. It is your face while you read email in the meeting. The sigh before you answer a question. Your pace in the hallway. Whose name you remember, and whose you don’t. The moment you looked up from your screen when someone came to your door — or the moment you didn’t.

Here is what nobody tells you when you take the role: the title is an amplifier. When you lead, people study you. They have to. Their days depend on your weather, so they become meteorologists of you. Your Tuesday mood becomes the building’s forecast. A passing comment from a peer is a comment; the same comment from you is a policy. You stopped being one voice in the room the day the room started waiting to hear yours.

Which means you are leaving a trace in every encounter, all day long, whether or not you intend one. You cannot opt out of impact. You can only opt out of noticing it.

I would like to tell you the man at the conference is the whole story. He isn’t. For every sentence that gets quoted back to me at a conference, there were others — the impatient ones, the distracted ones, the small dismissals I don’t remember either. Nobody comes up to you at a conference to return those. But they were carried too. They were carried just as far.

That is the part that could crush you, if you let it. I don’t think it should. I think it should slow you down.

Because the same reckoning that makes the careless sentence so heavy makes the kind one so unreasonably powerful. If twelve words in a hallway can hold for twenty years, then you are walking around all day with something enormous in your hands, and it costs almost nothing to use it well. A pause before you answer. A face that says the person in front of you is not an interruption. One sentence, noticed and given, on an ordinary afternoon.

You will not remember most of what you leave behind. That is not a flaw in the design. It may be the mercy in it — the trace does its work without asking you to watch.

But someone, somewhere, is still carrying a sentence of yours.

This is your spiritual footprint. You leave it everywhere — in every hallway, every meeting, every glance and every silence. You always have.

This reflection is inspired by The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

Michael J. Cunningham, OFS • spiritualbreak.com

Posted on July 3, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

The Yellow Light

The Yellow Light

A Spiritual Break Reflection

This morning, washing hands at the sink, soap bubbles catch the light and turn into tiny rainbows. For just a moment, my hands slowed in the warm water. Not because I needed to stop and have a “home-made” spiritual experience, but because something lovely was happening right there in my kitchen sink.

It reminded me of traffic lights—specifically that yellow light that begs us from motion into stillness. Not the jarring red that demands we stop, but that gentle amber invitation: something’s shifting here.

I sometimes notice these yellow light moments scattered throughout my days like breadcrumbs. They’re not asking for dramatic responses or profound revelations. They’re simply there, quiet invitations to notice what’s already present.

Sometimes it’s the particular way morning light falls across the lobby at the retreat house, turning ordinary wood golden. My mind pauses mid-sentence, not because I must stop and appreciate beauty, but because beauty has already stopped me. The moment passes, I return to whatever I was supposed to be doing, but something has shifted—a small opening where grace slipped in.

Or it’s the sound of rain beginning while writing an email. That first gentle pattering doesn’t demand I abandon my work for contemplation. It simply offers itself, and if I happen to notice, the soundtrack of an afternoon changes from mental chatter to nature’s rhythm.

These moments seem to arrive most naturally at transitions. Walking from the house to the car, I may notice how the air feels different today. Shifting from one task to another, there’s often a brief pause where I remember I’m not just a person checking boxes but someone alive in this moment. Even breathing has these built-in yellow lights—that slight pause between inhale and exhale, where everything briefly suspends.

Last week, talking with my daughter, she said something that made her voice catch slightly. Such a small thing—anyone might miss it. But there it was, a yellow light moment. I found myself listening differently, not interrogating or fixing, just receiving what she was really saying beneath the words. The conversation meandered into places it wouldn’t have gone if I’d stayed in my usual efficient parent mode. She was happy to be talking with me, the words might be somewhat irrelevant.

I don’t think life is constantly signaling us to pay attention—that would be exhausting. But there do seem to be these natural pause points woven through our days, gentle as that amber light that says transition is happening, no rush.

The poet Rumi wrote about selling cleverness and buying bewilderment. Maybe these yellow lights are life’s way of offering that trade. For just a moment, we can let go of knowing exactly where we’re going and simply be present to where we are.

This isn’t about trying to notice everything or turn daily life into a spiritual practice. It’s more like discovering that ordinary moments have their own quiet wisdom if we happen to be available when they offer it. The way tea changes color as it steeps. How shadows move across the wall as the afternoon progresses. The peculiar and beautiful silence that overcomes when snowfall begins.

Some days, I’m moving too fast to notice any yellow lights at all. Other days, one small moment of recognition—a dog stretching in a patch of sun, the smell of coffee brewing, the feeling of soft socks on tired feet—creates a tiny opening. Not a door demanding I walk through, just a window showing me what’s here.

Awakening isn’t something we achieve through effort. It could be more like slowly recognizing what’s been glowing softly all along. The sacred is scattered throughout our hours, not as a test or a challenge, but as a quiet gift for anyone who happens to be looking when life gently signals: here’s something worth noticing, if you’d like.

Tomorrow morning, you might catch one of these moments. Or you might not. Either way, they’ll keep coming, gentle as light itself, marking the transitions between rushing and resting, doing and being, sleeping and waking up to what’s been here all along.

The yellow lights aren’t trying to stop us or make us more spiritual. They’re simply part of the landscape, faithful as breathing, available as morning. And sometimes, when we’re moving at just the right speed, we notice them. And something in us says oh, yes and slows down just enough to receive what’s being offered.

That’s all. That’s enough. That’s everything.

Posted on June 19, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

A Walk on the Beach

A Walk On The Beach

Gone was the smell of rubber, normally ingrained in my father. My mother’s singing voice amplified and persisted more than usual. Strange phenomenon that I only really noticed during family holidays. Let me explain.

My parents were from the West Coast of Ireland; my mom was a “city girl” from Limerick, and my dad a country boy. Even though Limerick is technically on the coast, it cannot really be called a beach town, as the main waterway that dominates the city is the mighty River Shannon.
When the family moved to England in the early 1950s for work and children started to arrive, my parents’ “go to” place every year was the beach. Specifically, the wonderful and sometimes wild coast of Cornwall, home of the novel Poldark, Cornish pasties, and the best clotted cream in the world. (In my opinion).

Family time there always included time on the beach every day, regardless of the weather, which, being England, did not always co-operate with the summer season. These were wonderful days. For my parents, because neither of them could swim, the walk on the beach, with toes in the water was a wonderful break for them. My father had a fresh soap odor. This replaced the rubbery taste that had accompanied him for years of working at the Avon Tire Company. My mother’s step became lighter, and she would sing more than normal. We never knew if that was gift, but we took it as one. And having Fish and Chips a few times during the week was a real bonus. Especially as the fish was likely fresh off the boat and not some frozen specimen as we might find inland. Everything; the sea breeze, the food, the atmosphere, all tasted better.

We all have these places that represent a “walk on the beach”. Somewhere where pondering or reflecting seems to be better, freer, more in contact with nature and with God. Regardless of the weather!

Why is this? What does the ocean wash away that our steady, asphalt-filled, media-entrapped world cannot release from within? I think we may not be able to name it, but we can feel it. There is a release that this wide open place tells us about the doors and passageways of our regular lives. There is something else out there. Something requiring our immersion and permission to enter. Or perhaps expecting us to give ourselves permission to be present to it. Nature. Seasons. The place where land meets sea. Not just physically, but spiritually.

For myself, this taste of the ocean and the coast was always a desirable location to be. Now, located near the Pacific in California, it is always a place of refuge and enjoyment. The openness, the wildness, the calming nature of the waves, all contribute to why so many of us love the sea and the seashore.
I think we all feel this way, even when the ocean can be scary and intimidating. We have a certain respect for our own powerlessness when it rises up to meet us in a way we cannot contain. Just as life is that way sometimes. I wonder what your own experience of the ocean and shorelines is? Is the sea capable of washing away something in your soul, beyond the surface sand, and the daily tides?

All of life may not be a walk on the beach, but still, we look forward to one when we can get there.