Live with Intention: Remember and Do What Matters (Positive Affirmations, New Age Thought, Motivational Quotes)

Essentials for Living Your Intentional Life

“Mary Anne Radmacher has written a book of beauty, creativity, wisdom, and great good will. Her chapter on forgiveness alone is worth the price of the book.” —Hugh Prather, author of Morning Notes and The Little Book of Letting Go

Mary Anne Radmacher is among the most-quoted women writers of our day. Her wisdom is found on greeting cards, journals, calendars, Instagram and Pinterest, in broadcast news, sermons, ceremonies and commencement speeches.

Quotes you may recognize. “Courage doesn't always roar,” “It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else” and “There is no small act of kindness.” The poem, “Live with intention, walk to the edge, listen hard, practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Continue to learn. Appreciate your friends. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is,” has inspired people globally for decades.

Discover what is important to you. This noted author, artist and teacher lost a dear one. As memorial to her friend her book became the manifesto for an intentional life for thousands of people. In Live with Intention, Radmacher shares the story of how she learned to live more robustly by watching how her courageous friend chose to die. People who keep Radmacher’s writings at the ready, say this writing is both inspiring and comforting. Extraordinary lessons are drawn from ordinary experiences. Rich in story, metaphor and poetry, Live with Intention explores with you what it means to live each day with purposeful intent:

• Understand what matters most for you
• Deepen what already makes your life rich
• Determine your unique way to make a difference

Long after you've read this book you'll be picking it up randomly and repeatedly. If you’ve enjoyed books such as Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer, Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer, or The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo; Mary Anne Radmacher’s Live with Intention is your next must-read.

Pay Attention

Pay attention to the synchronicity of the events in your life.  People have different names for those visiting signals, the signs, the synergies of our lives. I had a unique understanding of God when I was very young. It often amused my Sunday School teachers, and it got me in conflict with some of the adults in the small world that was the church around the corner from my home. I remember with fondness conceptual arm-wrestling matches of ideas with a cherished cousin who was a biblical scholar. I remember one holiday when we were sent to the kitchen, behind a door, because our discourse, which we found fascinating, was too loud and making some uncomfortable. My cousin took exception to my saying that my coming to know God was a magic carpet ride. But he understood the sense of wonder, he listened to the awe that the reference implied. In that awe, I said yes to GOoD and GOoDness and have been saying yes ever since. He demonstrated the capacity to rise above the language of his embraced doctrine and see and hear me. Because he allowed that, I did not have to speak of matters of faith in the same way he did. We were able to take different roads and meet at the same door. Listening hard makes that kind of compassionate understanding possible.

Origami as Metaphor for Listening Hard

The patterns, the visual unlikelihood, the stretching of one’s imagination as it asks, “A flat piece of paper did that?” The interconnectedness of the origami folds strikes me as symbolic of the complex layers and folds of our days. Crease, fold, severe straight lines, each flat fold building upon flat fold until shaken or the strength of a breath is applied. With breath or stretch, there is transformation. Another form is recognized. What was familiar in one iteration becomes a bird in flight, a box, or a flower. This brings to mind those aha moments—when all the murky, disconnected complexities line up in magnificent order to say, “Here. Listen and look. This is the lesson I have been creating for you. Here is this lasting, difficult beauty for your life.”

In learning to listen, we must be both gentle and fierce. We must be willing to see beyond what we expect and courageous enough to honestly hear what is being said and to believe what is being demonstrated.