Welcome...

Come meander with me on the pathless path of the Heart
in these anecdotal,
sometimes inspiring, sometimes personal meanderings of the Heart's opening in the every-day-ness of life...

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Discerning the False - Lama Surya Das


If it looks like wisdom but is unkind,
it is not wisdom.

If it feels like love but is not wise,
it's not love.

Lama Surya Das


Monday, November 27, 2017

God Pours Light - Hafiz



God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching the darkness.

The proudly pious
stuff their cups with parchment
and critique the taste of ink

while God pours light...

And the trees lift their limbs
without worry of redemption,
every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls
with words that wet their parched
lips
as light
pours like rain
into every empty cup
set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.

Hafiz


Saturday, November 25, 2017

Death is a Favor to us - Hafiz



Death is a favor to us,
but our scales have lost their balance.
The impermanence of the body
should give us great clarity,
deepening the wonder in our
senses and eyes
of this mysterious existence we share
and surely are just traveling through...

[.....]

...all I know of life and myself is that
we are just a mid-air flight of golden wine
between [God's] Pitcher and His Cup.

[.....]

...our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
of time and space cannot endure very long.

Death is a favor to us,
but our minds have lost their balance.
The miraculous existence and impermanence of form
always makes the illumined ones
laugh and sing.

Hafiz

~

In memory of my mother-in-law who passed from this life
Nov. 12, 2017 after lingering many years with Alzheimer's...
Death was indeed a favor to her, allowing her Essence to
"pass through" and "journey on" beyond the fields we know...


Tuesday, November 21, 2017

The Purpose of the Journey - Joseph Campbell


The purpose of the journey is compassion.

When you have come past the pairs of opposites,
you have reached compassion.
The separateness apparent in the world is secondary.

Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen,
but experienced, unity and identity in us all.

Joseph Campbell
from The Hero's Journey

~*~

Compassion is knowing that
you are part of everyone,
and everyone is a part of you - is you.
When seeing this there is no longer judgment,
just a deeper understanding and respect
for our humanity -
a deeper compassion.

In the deep Stillness of Being
there is a deep compassion for everything that is.

There is compassion for the world
when seen as a whole - in context.
The nature of our Being is deep compassion.

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
c. 2004-2006


~

Photo - from a friend of a friend...


Saturday, November 18, 2017

Listen to Trees - Hermann Hesse


Trees are sanctuaries.  Whoever knows how to speak to them,
whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.
They do no preach learning and precepts, they preach
undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

[.....]

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer,
then a tree has something to say to us: Be still!  Be still!  Look
at me!  Life is not easy, life is not difficult.  These are childish
thoughts.... Home is neither here no there.  Home is within you,
or home is nowhere at all.

If one listens to them silently for a long time, it reveals its kernel,
its meaning.  It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's
suffering, though it may seem to be so.  It is a longing for home....,
for new metaphors for life.  It leads home.  Every path leads
homeward, every step is birth, every step is death...

When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and
the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve
an incomparable joy.  Whoever has learned to listen to trees no
longer wants to be a tree.  He wants to be nothing except what he is.
That is home.  That is happiness.

Hermann Hesse
Trees: Reflections and Poems

via: Love Is A Place


Thursday, November 16, 2017

Happiness - Hermann Hesse


As long as you chase happiness,
you are not ready to be happy,
even if you owned everything.

As long as you lament a loss,
run after prizes in restless races,
you have not yet known peace.

But when you have moved beyond desire,
become a stranger to your goals and longings
and call no longer on happiness by name,

then your heart rises calmly
above the ebb and flow of action
and peace has reached your soul.

Hermann Hesse
translation by Ludwig Max Fischer

via: The Beauty We Love


Monday, November 13, 2017

Trust Your Vision - Ivan Granger



So often we pour ourselves intensely into life's purpose without
actually pausing to consider why we are doing what we are doing.
How is it a reflection of who we truly are?  How does it express
our specific qualities and role within the larger panorama?  What
does it imply about the fundamental nature of reality?

Rarely in the modern world are we encouraged to discover our
vision and dedicate ourselves to it.  To the prevailing mindset,
one's vision is thought to be intangible, suggesting something
that is a fantasy whose pursuit is narcissistic or even delusional.
The focus of life must be practical with goals that are approved
and easily measured.

That approach, while seemingly reasonable and safe, is
devastating to both the individual and to society as a whole.
While we certainly must live effectively within the physical
and social worlds that require a certain level of practical purpose,
we are not such stunted creatures that exist only on that level.
We are magical beings, here to embody immensity and love and
the will of the universe as it expresses itself uniquely through
each of us.

Vision is the way we discover our personal path through the world.
Vision is the way we come to know ourselves, allowing us to be as
we are, showing us how to act with strength and creativity in
service to our true [vision].

A vision is not the same as some fantasy or daydream.  A true
 vision is the voice of nature, the intention of the universe,
uniquely tuned to our soul.

The word "vision" can trip us up because we think of seeing
things that are external to our physical bodies, so we often
consider a vision to be external to us.  But vision in the
spiritual sense is the conscious mind's way to assign meaning
to the deep recognition of self as a harmonious expression of the
self-aware universe. In other words, vision is not so much about
seeing as it is about being.  A vision is a challenge to ourselves
to be more fully ourselves.  Vision is a vocation, the calling of
the soul to its true role.

The first question is, how strongly do we want to see?  And then
we must answer the second question, do we dare live the truth
seen?  Then again, what's the point to any other path but our own?

Ivan Granger
commentary on the poem
"Trust Your Vision" by Stephen Levine
Poetry Chaikhana

~

Photo - Sunset digitally enhanced...



Friday, November 10, 2017

Bare Awareness - Danna Faulds



Bare awareness
awake to its
true nature -
limitless and
vast, nothing to
grasp, no masks
or name tag.

What am I beyond
the answers of the
mind, outside
anything I can
find by seeking?

What is true
right now, and
what is transitory?

The witness watches
thoughts spin their
convincing stories
out of thin air and
doesn't care how
often I forget
that freedom is
the truth of being,
and no part of truth
is ever separate
from what is.


Danna Faulds
from: Limitless: 2009

~

Golden Sunset




Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Keeping Quiet - Pablo Neruda


Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth
let's not speak in any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush...
we would all be together
in sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.

If we are not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Pablo Neruda
re: slowing down and living in peace with each other
English version Alastair Reed

~

Photo: Meditating Monk
Painting: "Canyon Spirits"
2013



Sunday, November 5, 2017

Seek The Mystery - Ken Kesey


The answer is never the answer.
What's really interesting is the mystery.
...seek the mystery instead of the answer...
I've never seen anybody really find the answer.

They think they have, so they stop [seeking].
But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery...
Plant a garden in which strange plants grow
and mysteries bloom.

The need for mystery is greater than the need
for an answer.


Ken Kesey 
author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest


Thursday, November 2, 2017

In Our Consciousness of Time - Wendell Berry


In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past.  When
we say, "This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water," it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said, "now," it was gone.

If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of measurers we don't
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.

You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and alive, causing the heart
to sway in the rifts between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own.  This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.

Is it concentration of the mind
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.

Wendell Berry
From: Leavings
2007