Posted on 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 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.

 

 

 

 

Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

Why Can’t Every Day Be a Spiritual Day?

I have been asked this question more than once over the years. Sometimes by retreatants leaving San Damiano on the last morning. Sometimes by people who attend the Monday gatherings. Sometimes, honestly, by myself.

The literal answer is that, of course, it cannot be. The world will not stop for you. The meetings will be scheduled. The emails will arrive. The unpleasant colleague will still be sitting across the table tomorrow morning. We cannot turn each day into a retreat.

But the question contains its own answer if we are willing to look at it differently.

What we are really asking, when we ask that question, is whether the peace we found on retreat can travel home with us. Whether the silence that opened something can keep opening it on a Tuesday morning. Whether God, who felt so near in the chapel, can be near in the conference room too.

The answer is yes. But it requires a different kind of seeing.

I spent thirty-five years in the competitive high-tech industry. Some of that time was spent trying to help people in discord work toward a common goal. We usually had the goal. What we sometimes did not have was a culture, or a set of behaviors, that matched it. People in the same meeting could agree on the destination and still treat each other in ways that made the destination impossible. I watched it for decades. I sometimes contributed to it.

It was in those years that I came to believe Karl Rahner was right when he said the Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all.

That sentence is often misread as a warning about decline. It is actually a description of what is required to remain human. Rahner was not talking about visions or ecstasies. He was talking about the lived experience of love, of goodness, of God — directly, in one’s own life, not borrowed from a teacher or absorbed from a book. He believed that without that direct experience, faith would not survive what was coming.

I think he was describing not just the future of faith but the future of any meaningful day at work.

So, I spent more than a decade trying to figure out how the peace of the monastery could travel into the ordinary. The Celts knew how. The desert fathers knew how. The Sufis, the Hasidim, and the Zen masters knew how, each in their own language. None of them taught withdrawal as the goal. They taught a way to stay present in the midst of what is, without losing the thread that connects you to God.

This is what I have come to call everyday mysticism. It does not require a different life. It requires different attention. The same conference room becomes a different room when you walk into it, noticing, pausing, and responding from a settled heart rather than a reactive one. The unpleasant interaction is not transformed by avoidance. It is transformed by the trace you leave inside it.

That trace is your spiritual footprint. It is the soul leaking out around the edges of whatever you do. And it can be formed.

So no, every day cannot be a spiritual break day. But every day can carry the same mystical possibility, if you are willing to bring it in yourself. The retreat is not the place. The retreat is the disposition. You can leave the chapel and take it with you, or you can sit in the chapel and never receive it.

The choice is interior. It is yours. And it is available tomorrow morning at nine.

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Spiritual Break – The Gathering

 

Dear Friends,

A few years ago I was walking in the woods in New Hampshire with my friend Tom. We had been talking for hours — the way you can with old friends you haven’t seen in a long time. As we entered a stand of trees above the stream on his property, he stopped, breathed in slowly, and said:

“Mike, this is my sanctuary … This is my chapel.”

I’ve thought about that moment many times since. Not because it was unusual — but because it was true. And because most of us have a place like that, or a moment like that, and we rarely stop long enough to name it.

That’s what Sacred Noticing is, at its heart. The practice of stopping long enough to name what is already here.

I’ve been writing about this practice for a few years now. And for a while, I’ve been sitting with a quiet thought: that it might be better practiced together than alone. So I’m opening a monthly gathering. Nothing elaborate. One hour on the first Tuesday of each month, online via Zoom. A small group of people who want to sit with the practice together — with some silence, a short reflection, and honest conversation about what the practice is doing in ordinary life.

The first gathering is in July. We’ll begin with The Sanctuary — which is where everything else begins. Where Tom stopped in the woods. Where the practice finds its ground. I’ve written a reflection on that theme which I’ll share in full on the site. A few lines from it, to give you a feel for where we’ll begin:

We all have these places in our lives. Somewhere where the encounter with the marvel of God’s creation snuggles us tightly. Where we are, once again, in the womb that gave us life.

Perhaps you can visit yours again soon.

Read the full reflection — The Sanctuary

If you’d like to join us in July, just reply to this email with the word Gathering. I’ll send you the Zoom link — it’s permanent, so you’ll only ever need to ask once. There’s no registration form, no course to sign up for, no commitment beyond showing up when it’s right for you. The door is open on the first Tuesday. Come if you can.

The Sacred Noticing Gathering — July

And going forward the First Tuesday of each month

Time: [6:30pm] Pacific · [9:30pm] Eastern · [TIME] GMT

One hour · Online via Zoom · Free

 

Theme for July: The Sanctuary

 

To join: reply to this email with the word Gathering.

I will send the Zoom link by return.

One more thing. Some of you have been asking about the book. The Practice of Sacred Noticing is now available — on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and as a signed copy directly from me if you’d prefer that. It’s the written companion to what we’ll be doing together each month. I’m glad it’s finally in the world.

Get the Book

All formats

Order a personally signed copy, or find Sacred Noticing at your preferred bookseller.

Where is your sanctuary right now?

Perhaps it’s closer than you think.

I’ll see you on the first Tuesday.

— Michael

spiritualbreak.com

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 5 Comments

The Childhood of a Thought

A thought arrived one morning, as thoughts do, carrying the particular confidence of a thing that has been here before.

It came wearing familiar clothing — a worry I recognize, a narrative I have followed many times down the same corridor to the same small room. It arrived not as a stranger but as a regular guest who knows where the kettle is kept, who doesn’t bother knocking anymore.

I noticed this. Not immediately — that would be too tidy. For a few moments I followed it where it wanted to go, the way you follow someone down a hallway before you realize you were not intending to go in that direction.

And then something shifted. Not through discipline, not through the effort of attention redirected. More like a small adjustment in altitude. A step back and up — just slightly — to somewhere I could see the thought from the outside, the way you see weather from a hillside rather than from inside it.

That small shift is what I want to share with you today.

Most of us live in the valley most of the time. It is not a criticism — it is just the default geography of an unexamined life.

In the valley, thoughts become indistinguishable from the one thinking them. You are anxious and you are the anxiety. You are grieving and you are the grief. You are the irritated version of yourself in the car behind the slow driver, and you are entirely that irritation, with no remainder.

The valley is not a bad place. It is an honest place. Everything feels real there because it is real — the thought you are inside is a genuine thought, the feeling it carries is a genuine feeling. The valley doesn’t lie to you about the temperature.

What the valley withholds is the view.

From the hillside, you can still see the weather in the valley. You are not pretending it isn’t there. You are not trying to achieve some elevated spiritual state, above the ordinary mess of things. You are simply — and this simplicity is the whole of it — at a vantage point from which the thought can be seen as a thought, rather than lived as the whole of reality.

The hillside is not distant. It is available whenever you remember to look for it. The practice of Sacred Noticing — the Pause, the small breath before response — is the path up the hillside. It is not a long path. Sometimes it is one step.

Here is what the contemplative tradition rarely tells us: from the hillside, the thought is not frightening.

It is, in fact, rather like a child playing hide and seek.

My granddaughter, who has hidden behind the curtain — the curtain that does not reach the floor, the feet clearly visible beneath it — is entirely certain she cannot be seen. This certainty is not a failure of intelligence. It is the logic of hiding. She has entered the game fully, has committed to the position, and is experiencing with complete sincerity the thrill of concealment.

From where I am standing, I can see her completely. I know exactly where she is. I am in no danger of being surprised.

And what you feel — if you are paying attention to what you actually feel rather than what you think you should feel — is not strategic advantage. It is affection. She is delightful precisely in her certainty of invisibility. You are not trying to defeat her. You are not trying to expose her as a fraud. You can simply see her, and see her from love.

 

I can see you.

 

This is the interior movement that changes everything. Not a shout. Not an accusation. A quiet recognition, offered without alarm.

The thought that has been arriving with such confident familiarity — the one that knows where the kettle is, that doesn’t knock anymore — when seen from the hillside, does something interesting. It shifts. Repackages. Tries a slightly different approach, a new disguise, a different door. Because the pattern that has been running on the groove of long habit is not accustomed to being seen. It has relied on invisibility. The groove is its infrastructure.

And you, from the hillside, can watch this with something very close to tenderness. Because the hiding child is not your enemy. This is a pattern that learned, somewhere, that this particular hiding place was safe. It has childhoods of its own.

Evagrius Ponticus was a fourth-century desert father whose insight into the inner life remains startling sixteen centuries later. He called these recurring visitors logismoi — not quite the word “thoughts” in our modern sense, but thoughts with momentum, thoughts that have learned to travel in particular patterns, thoughts that arrive not randomly but along the groove worn by all their previous arrivals.

Evagrius was not describing pathology. He was describing the ordinary interior landscape of any person who pays attention. The thoughts of anxiety, of restlessness, of accumulated grievance — these are not signs that something has gone wrong. They are signs that something happened, and the groove it wore is still there, still operative, still offering its well-worn path to the mind that arrives unguarded.

What the desert fathers knew — and what the hiding child helps us feel rather than merely understand — is that the groove is not the self. The thought is not the thinker. The weather is not the valley.

You did not choose the first arrival of the thought that arrives most persistently now. You were not always in a position to choose what happened when it arrived. The groove was worn before you had the vocabulary for it, in rooms you may no longer be able to name.

But you are here now. On the hillside. With a view you did not always have.

Let’s be honest about what this practice can and cannot do.

You cannot, through the act of noticing a thought from the hillside, simply choose to be free of it. The groove does not disappear because you have seen it. The pattern that has been running for years does not dissolve in the recognition.

What changes is smaller — and more important.

The moment between the thought’s arrival and your following it — that is where freedom actually lives. Not in heroic moral choice, not in the achievement of a spiritual state, not in the successful suppression of an unwanted interior visitor. In the gap. In the brief moment where the hillside view is available and the groove has not yet run.

Evagrius was precise about this. The thought arriving is not a moral event. The following is where choice enters. And the choice, in the beginning, can be nothing more dramatic than: I can see you.

That seeing — held for even five seconds before the pattern runs — is the practice. It does not require the suppression of the thought or the prior resolution of whatever the thought carries. It requires only the momentary altitude of the hillside view.

And here is what becomes true over time, through practice rather than through discipline: the groove grows shallower. Not because you have fought it successfully. Because the following — the automatic, unexamined continuation — has been interrupted enough times that the groove’s infrastructure begins, slowly, to loosen.

You are not choosing to be free. You are practicing the single small act of freedom that is actually available to you, in the actual moment you find yourself in.

Which, it turns out, is enough.

 

The Thought That Arrived

It came in wearing yesterday’s clothes,

certain of its welcome,

certain I wouldn’t notice

what it had been wearing last time.

I noticed.

Not in triumph.

The way you notice a child

who believes the curtain

reaches the floor.

I can see you,

I said, without saying anything.

And watched it

try a different angle.

Repackage.

Arrive as something else.

Quieter.

More itself.

The thought passed.

The way weather passes

when nothing holds it.

And the room received

what the thought

would have prevented.

 

The thoughts you have been hosting are not you.

They are the patterns formed by what you did with thoughts that came before them. They have childhoods too — shaped by receptions you barely remember making, in rooms you may not even be able to name.

You did not choose the first arrival. You were not always in a position to choose what happened next.

But you are here now.

On the hillside.

With a view you did not always have.

And what moves through the gap the hillside creates is not yours to manufacture.

It is yours to receive.

 

Which has always been the better invitation.

 

Which thought has been arriving longest — and what would change if you could watch it from the hillside just once before it becomes the weather?

 

— Michael

spiritualbreak.com

 

“I want to mention quietly, as you are my closest readers, that The Practice of Sacred Noticing book is now available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon, in both print and digital formats. You’ll find it here. I’ll have signed copies ready to send in about ten days if you’d like to wait for one of those instead. Either way, I’m glad it’s finally in the world.”