Liminal Space - Alan Seale

 Liminal space is the waiting space.  That space between an
end and a beginning.  That space and time when we are
no longer where we were, yet we are not yet in a new place.
A space that can feel empty, where we can feel lost and
confused.  Yet when we are fully present to this waiting
time - when we are willing to accept this seeming emptiness
without conditions and let it talk to us - what has been
hidden can slip quietly into the open.  What has been a
mystery begins to be understood.  The "waiting space"
becomes a discovery space.

It can feel like you are caught in between.....you realize 
that something is going on in your inner awareness.

It is a "crossing over" space.  It's a transition space,
that can take many forms...

Liminal space can cause us to question the very core of
our beliefs...  It shakes us out of our habitual lives,,,  It
draws us out of what we have known...  The liminal space
is an invitation to surrender.....and navigate the uncertainty,
trusting that we will be supported...

This is the space where a new reality can be born.  It's a space
where we can finally let go of a way of being, a role, an identity,
or a belief, so that something new can be created [born]... letting
something completely dissolve, leaving us open and free to
discover what is waiting for us...

Alan Seale
Excerpts from: Transformational Presence

read the full article here

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Photo - Mystic Meandering
reflection of light in a shadow on the kitchen counter :)

What Are Your Beliefs? - Dave Gray

 Beliefs are not reality.  They are not facts.
They are constructions.  You construct your beliefs,
even though for most people this is an unconscious
process, and they hold you captive.  Your beliefs form
the fundamental model that you use to navigate the
world.

By beliefs I mean everything you know [or think you know].
All beliefs are approximations [of reality/truth]. because the
whole of reality is unknowable.  None of us can ever
completely understand.

A belief is something you hold in your mind, a kind of map
or model of external reality.  But just as maps and models
can be wrong, so can your beliefs.

When people confuse their beliefs with reality, they get
into [political and religious] arguments and conflicts, 
sometimes even wars.

We are all blind.  We may be able to grasp pieces of the truth,
but the whole truth about reality is unknowable [in the sense
of not being intellectually understandable by the mind].

Any understanding we can gain of the world will be limited
by our point of view.  We are each constrained by the boundaries
of our own experience [conditioning] - which form our beliefs.

Beliefs may seem like perfect representations of the world, but,
in fact, they are imperfect models for navigating a complex,
multidimensional, unknowable reality.

We create beliefs about reality to reduce its infinite complexity,
in order to make it easier to understand [or explain, or justify].

Dave Gray
Excerpts from: Liminal Thinking

[brackets mine]

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Photo - Mystic Meandering

Full Participation - Matt Licata

 With the moon as your witness, renew your vow to no
longer postpone your full participation here, for even
one moment.  It is rare for one human being to allow the
implications of what it really means to take birth in a
star where love is alive.

While it may appear that your sensitivity and your heartbreak
are obstacles along the way, look carefully and see they are
forming the light strands of your journey in every moment.

Within the embodied temple of your heart-essence nature, 
everything is utterly valid, outrageously intelligent, and
overwhelmingly creative.

Without you and your vulnerability - without your unique gifts,

your courage, and your willingness to give everything for the
call to intimacy with all things - this realm will never know the
burning essence of timeless and eternal love.  The oceans, the
galaxies, the snow-capped mountains, and the translucent stars
are counting on you, for it is only through you that love can
enter into this rare world of time and space.

May love pour through you, awakening your cells, your organs,
and each and every strand of your sacred DNA.  May it open you
to the magic of the sacred world, re-wiring everything in its
wake with its signature and fragrance of aliveness.  May it make
use of your eyes to see the truth, your hands to touch another
sweetly, your body to feel more, your words to speak kindness,
and your presence to shower healing upon everyone and everything
you encounter.

May the mysteries of separation and union pour out of the unseen
and take form as your body, your nervous system, and as the flow
of thought, feeling, and emotion within you, crafted as a vehicle
of grace to see this world with the wild, creative, particles
of love.

Matt Licata, PhD
From a post on his blog

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Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Power of Poetry - Ari Honarvar

Artist - Puisi 

...poetry is as much a part of a person as her heartbeat.
We can take refuge in the power of poetry.

Rumi not only understood the power of poetry, but also
found the sweet spot of language somewhere between
the clinical sterility of political correctness and the 
vulgarity of fanaticism.

He brought the traditional masculine God from the sky
and passionately embraced it as his genderless Beloved.
He and other poets like him closed the gap between us
and the divine until the Beloved was inside our beating
hearts - transforming the image of a rigid God of fire
and brimstone into the story of bittersweet longing
and union.

We partake together and the flow of emotion and creativity
merges, making it possible for us to participate in what we
long for: a deep connection with the divine...
[a deep *knowing* of the divine in us/as us].

Ari Honarvar
From: Rumi's Gift

[brackets mine]

Artist - Puisi

Children of "The Mystery"...

 As children of "The Mystery"
we wander - sometimes from refuge to refuge,
belief to belief,
trying to find what we originally are -
our Original Face,
our Indigenous Nature - beyond tribe;
not of place or time - but
before beliefs, concepts, dogma and doctrine.
We search until we recognize that
Inherent Nature within again and again;
until we have a felt sense of that which
animates our very being; until that
Intrinsic Fundamental Nature
shines through;
until we feel it as that
which we Are - "The Mystery" - in form -
embodied...

Not unknowable, but viscerally tangible...
the intuitive "knowing" of what we Innately Are -
our Living Naturalness...

And our being delights in the recognition -
as "The Mystery" responds with delight in us!
with playfulness and song!
- at being recognized...

Liberated!

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 20, 2020

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Photo - Mystic Meandering
I was sitting across the room from the window one morning
with the window open, and saw this "Spirit Face" looking in...
the play of light and shadow on the bushes outside the window.
Hope you can see her.  I sat in awe and wonder as "she" peered
through the window with shadowy eyes, looking downward
to the left...

~

What I call "The Mystery" in this poem has many names.
Sometimes I have called it Eternal Being, True Self, True
Nature, Source, The Silence, The Universe, Core Being,
our Essence, The Beloved, and so on...

The Wildest Comfort - Kathleen Dean Moore

 I don't know what despair is, if it's something or nothing, a kind
of filling up or an emptying out.  I don't know what sorrow does
to the world, what it adds or takes away.  What I think I do
know now is that sorrow is part of the Earth's great cycles,
flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course.
To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the Earth, the surge from
living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist.
Maybe this is why the Earth has the power over time to wash
sorrow into a deeper pool....  And maybe this is why, even though
 sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the
 currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of
wonder and solace...

...I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from,
this splitting open of the self.  It takes me by surprise.
Not an answer of beauty and mystery, but beauty and
mystery themselves, flooding into a mind suddenly
without boundaries.  Can this be gladness, to be lifted
by that flood?

...The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery
of transformation, one thing into another.

This is the wildest comfort.

Kathleen Dean Moore
Excerpts from - Wild Comfort - The Solace of Nature

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Wait for the Empty Playground - Li-Young Lee

 Wait for evening.
Then you'll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.
Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes
and pretended to be invisible.
The one to whom you told every secret.
The one who made a world of any hiding place.

And don't forget the one who listened in silence
while you wondered out loud:

Is the universe an empty mirror?  A flowering tree?

Is the universe the sleep of a woman?

Wait for the sky's last blue
(the color of your homesickness).

Then you'll know the answer.

Wait for the air's first gold (that color of Amen).
Then you'll spy the wind's barefoot steps.

Then you'll recall that story beginning
with a child who strays in the woods.

The search for him goes on in the growing
shadow of the clock.

And the face behind the clock's face
is not his father's face.

And the hands behind the clock's hands
are not his mother's hands.

All of Time began when you first answered
to the names your mother and father gave you.

Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.
Then, you can trade places with the wind.

Then you'll remember your life
as a book of candles,
each page read by the light of its own burning.

Li-Young Lee

Poem: "Become Becoming"

From: Behind My Eyes

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Photo - Mystic Meandering

A Quiet Spirit - Henry David Thoreau

 When I detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature,
I am reminded by the serene and retired spirit in which it
requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible privacy of life -
how silent and unambitious it is.
The beauty there in mosses will have to be considered from
the holiest, quietest nook.

My truest, serenest moments are too still for emotions...

~

To be calm, to be serene!
There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath
of wind; there is the calmness of a stagnant ditch.  So it is
with us.
Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never 
were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some 
unconscious obedience to the all-just laws,
so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal
and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves.

~

I awoke into a music which no one by me heard.
Whom shall I thank for it?  I feel it a blessing.
To the sane man the world is a musical instrument.
The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure.

Henry David Thoreau

taken from a journal entry, June 22, 1851

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Meeting Ourselves with Kindness - Stephen Levine

 When we turn toward our pain instead of away from it,
self-mercy enters those parts of ourselves we had closed off,
withdrawn from, or abandoned to feelings of impotence.  When
it seems there is nowhere else to turn, when all our prayers and
strategies [practices] seem to be of little avail, something deeper
arises: a mercy that leads toward the heart.

Without mercy (a quality of loving kindness that is the tender
acceptance of even that which might be otherwise unacceptable) as an
alternative to holding our pain, we abandon those most painful
memories within us to harsh judgment and merciless reflection.

The appearance of mercy ,...compassion... is absolutely
unmistakable as we learn to open into that which once was
closed off.

Memories may always be bittersweet, but me may also find
peace flickering at the edges of what once caused us agitation.
Healing, then, becomes not the absence of pain, but the
increased ability to meet it with mercy instead of loathing.
No one can wholly remove our pain.  All we can do is increase
the spaciousness of mind and heart in which it is allowed to
decompress.

We meet ourselves with simple kindness that confounds our
addiction to critical self-judgment.  We find ourselves more
likely to meet others' confusion and helplessness open-heartedly.
We find less need for others or ourselves to be different in order
to be loved.

We find ourselves...

Stephen Levine
from - Unattended Sorrow

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Fall Open - Amoda Maa

 

Adversity or suffering is an "organic" part of the human
condition and despite the discomfort and/or issues it brings,
it typically also offers an opportunity for growth or breakthrough.

It is only when we meet life from the unknown - and that is 
what Silence really is, an open-ended unknownness - that we can
really listen to what is true.

...meeting life - right here and now, in this moment - is 
ultimately an invitation to embrace openness.  I invite you
to reject nothing, welcome everything, and surrender into
the deepest falling of the open heart.

I invite you to fall open, even when your world is falling
apart...

The personal and global crises we experience in today's world
offer a potent opportunity to turn our allegiance from
the war with reality to the Silent Awareness that is always here.

What is closer than economic collapse?
What is closer than social breakdown?
What is closer than any loss?
What is more intimate and direct than
any thought?

If you stop and listen...
If you stop and feel...
there is the warmth of your body,
the ebb and flow of your breath,
and the pulse in your belly.

If you stop and soften,
there is the simplicity of being.

This recognition of the truth of your innermost nature
is not a spiritual palliative.
It's not about denying what's going on in the world.
It's not about sticking your head in the sand.

It's about meeting reality as it is,

not as you imagine it to be.

Amoda Maa

Excerpts from an article in Stillness Speaks

with thanks to Dorothea Mills

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Causeless Joy - Naomi Shihab Nye

 It's difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness, there's something to rub against.
A wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you,
you have pieces to pick up, something to hold
in your hands like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
Doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house singing
and disappears when it wants to. 

[.....]

Everything has a life of its own.

It, too, could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake
and ripe peaches and love even the floor which needs to be
swept, the soiled linens, and scratched records... 

Since there's no place large enough to contain so much happiness,
 you shrug, your raise your hands, and it flows out of you into
 everything you touch.

You're not responsible.

You take no credit.

As the night sky takes no credit for the moon,
but continues to hold it and to share it
and in that way, be known.

Naomi Shihab Nye

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

I know it may seem strange to be posting about
Joy and Happiness etc. during such chaotic, disruptive,
apocalyptic times. I'm surprised as well that this has happened,
so just offering a bit of inspiration...  

This doesn't mean that I am
untouched by the struggles and difficulties of others.
I also continue to have my "moments" as well...

There's a lot going on for all of us...

The world, even with its turmoil, becomes, or is seen as,
a "divine play" or Cosmic Dance.  We find we can be
in the world, as it is, and not struggle with what is happening,
or try to "fix" it; but allow life to unfold as it does in its own rhythm;
 not seeking "liberation" or freedom from the world, but living
from the Deep Quiet space within, and let that show us 
where we can contribute with mindful engagement,

not emotional, reactive chaos...

MM

The Sandbox of Life - Joan Ruvinsky

 "Embodied liberation" means fully experiencing life as it
passes through us: Celebrations, catastrophes and all the
boring bits in between.  "This"- the Unspeakable - is
wholly present throughout the ups and downs, joys and
tribulations, work life, love life, whether monk or householder.

Thoughts do not have to cease, likes and dislikes do not
have to disappear, dress code, name and personality do not
have to change.  There is no particular image to which the one
who is "liberated' need conform.  Cultural trappings are not
necessary.  The West has often been impressed by the outward
image or appearance  of the co-called "enlightened being",
but had often judged its homegrown saints by false criteria.
Jeans and sneakers are fine.  Orange robes are fine. A business
suit is fine.  Who is to judge?  Who is to compare?  Even
saints eat ice cream.

The behavior of someone who is "liberated" in this lifetime 
is often unpredictable.  Consciousness, of her own inherent
spontaneity, manifests variously.  Personality characteristics
such as joy, warmth, compassion, and sympathy are not
necessarily foolproof markers of "enlightenment."

This bliss/joy of Consciousness is simply resting in what is.
It may not be obvious to an onlooker, as it is at a vibrational
level far above the ordinary perception through the five senses.
This bliss/joy abides regardless of what we are doing or
thinking...  It is unconditioned and ever-present.

We can play all we want in the sandbox [of life], but we
always know where home is.  Even at play, we are at home.

Joan Ruvinsky
From: The Recognition of Our Own Heart

~

Personal Note:  In my new found sense of  playful "freedom"
I do not feel "liberated" from anything, in the traditional
sense of the word, nor was it a goal that I was trying to 
achieve.  It just happened spontaneously, uncontrived, when
I started tapping into my Child-like Nature, aka our Natural State,
 - internally feeling "liberated" from the inner struggle
 to "figure it all out" - this "spiritual" thing that I've been
 doing for the past 37 years or more...

There is a new sense of "freedom" to just be myself in this new
found playful attitude with life; accepting myself as I am, 
as I express my Natural Nature; tapping into the "magic" or
"mystical" side of life through playfulness - spontaneously
navigating my way through life as it is...

~

The bliss/joy of our Natural State allows us to feel "liberated."

Mitch Rosacker
Self Discovery Studio

~

Life is a playground.....
We must play, retiring at night
empty-handed and tired...

Ari Hanarvar

From: Rumi's Gifts

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Cosmic Light...

 Sadness gives way to spontaneity...
The inner child of the Cosmos
has come to play...

There's a hidden joy inside that shimmers up
- playful,
tickling the heart...

Subtle joy turns into Love for the whole experience of
LIFE
knowing it's all the "Play" of the Cosmos...

The Light of the Cosmos
hidden within myself
begins to glow -
an unlit light.

It is the rhythm of the Cosmos that moves me,
taking my breath away,
making my heart skip;
and the realization that

I am Cosmic Light -
lit from within!

I am the Cosmos!

I am the Joy of the Universe...

It's all the Play of Cosmic Light!

Mystic Meandering
Sept 21, 2020

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Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

71 years around the Sun-star today!

Hard to believe...

More playful, "light-hearted", and unencumbered...
Intuitively listening to where she wants to spend her
heart beats in these waning years....

_/\_

Namaste

A Playful Journey Has Begun...

 A playful journey has begun...

The idea of "enlightenment"
no longer captures her mind.

In her child-like-ness she knows
she is free -
through the innocence and spontaneity of divine play.
Playing in the vast cosmos
liberates her - from the inside -
unburdens her heart...

No "spiritual" image to live up to...
No dogma or doctrine or belief system to follow...

She now spontaneously moves and expresses
the rhythm of her Original Nature in her playfulness;
expressing herself in a language whose origins
she vaguely remembers,

calling to her in playful tunes...

Others may think her eccentric now,
but she is who she always was,
an authentic expression of her Natural Innocence,
at play in the Vast Mystery of the Universe...

Mystic Meandering

Oct. 2, 2020

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Swing Girl and Swing Boy :)