We all come with skills and talented. If we’re smart, we’ll develop both of them. Both of them require discipline, because all the talent and deftness in the world doesn’t mean anything unless you take responsibility for those gifts.

Some gifts, those we perfect by dogged practice, take more out of us (even if they demand no less of us) than things that come naturally to us. We’ve worked and worked and worked to get good at things, they may or may not thrill us, or they may please us simply for the fact that we accomplished them. We may work our whole lives with nothing but our skills because it’s the work available to us. It’s good to work with your skills but it’s better, if we can to work with our talents.

Those are those gifts that show up in us and wait for us to discover. Sometimes I feel when I use the things I’m best at, whether it’s ritual or presence, that I am in another world entirely… the world where everything fits just the way it’s supposed to. It’s the world where I am truly alive and soaring.

What are those things for you? Can you sort it out? Are you practicing both? One? or the Other? Do you understand that that hard work is prayer? Take yourself seriously. Don’t take your gifts for granted, take them with great gratitude.

And in the meantime. Stand on the picket lines, shovel the snow, cook a pot of soup, winterize someone’s house and stuff the envelopes. Those are the things that build the realm of Peace.