"I am just here to be beautiful"

…I suspect that too often we have lost contact with the source of our own existence and have become strangers in our own house. We tend to run around trying to solve the problems of our world while anxiously avoiding confrontation with that reality wherein our problems find their deepest roots: our own selves. In many ways we are like the busy executive who walks up to a precious flower and says: “What for God’s sake are you doing here? Can’t you get busy somehow?” and then finds the flower’s response incomprehensible: “I am sorry, but I am just here to be beautiful.”

How can we also come to this wisdom of the flower that being is more important than doing? How can we come to a creative contact with the grounding of our own life? Only through a teacher who can lead us to the source of our existence by showing us who we are and, thereby, what we are to do. – Henri Nouwen, in “Creative Ministry”