Dance Between the Worlds - Joseph Campbell

As we love ourselves, we move toward our own bliss, by which
Joseph Campbell meant our highest enthusiasm.  The word entheos
means "god-filled." Moving towards that which fills us with the
godhood [or Buddha Nature, The Mystery, Pure Consciousness,
etc.], that place where time is not, is all we need to do to change
our world.  Then we, naturally and without effort, love others
and allow them to move beyond their self-imposed limitations,
and in their own ways.  The goal is to evolve to that place where
the energy that had been projected outward to correct the [them]
 world is turned around to correct oneself - to find your own "track"
[rhythm] and to dance, in balance between the worlds.

Following your bliss, as Joseph meant it, is not self-indulgent
but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the
way to be alive in this world and the way to give to the world
the very best that you have to offer.

From: A Joseph Campbell Companion
Selected and edited by Diane K. Osbon

with thanks to HeronDance.org/e-journal

Photo from the Internet

 

Living in The Dream - Herman Hesse

Art by Alaire Bird
 

The things we see, Pistorius softly said, are the same things
that are within us.  There is no reality except the one contained
within us.  That is why so many people live in such an unreal
life.  They take the images outside them for reality and never
allow the world within to assert itself.  You can be happy that
way.  But once you know the other interpretation you no longer
have the choice of following the crowd.  Sinclair, the majority's
path is an easy one, ours is difficult.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of
yourself.  What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.  Each
of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is
forbidden... Forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to
transgress a single law and still be a bastard.  And vice versa.

I live in  my dreams - that's what you sense.
Other people live in dreams, but not in their own.
That's the difference.

Hermann Hesse
excerpts from Damian

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

 

Unchangingness - Kathleen Knipp

Sustain your own refuge...
Rest in your inner sanctuary when the storm hits...
Be pulled toward your own North star...

Access whatever it is that helps you to feel at ease,
to feel safe, to let down your guard, to experience
equanimity...

Use imagery finding your way home...

The path becomes very intuitive, and profoundly resting...
Contracting thoughts, emotions and somatic sensations
happen against a backdrop of unchangingness...

Kathleen Knipp
Excerpts from a Yoga Nidra meditation

~

If you're looking for a little sanity in this insane world,
in these challenging times, you might find these Yoga Nidra
meditations by Kathleen Knipp, of Pathless Yoga, helpful in
sustaining your equanimity and sense of peace...

https://pathlessyoga.com/listen/

scroll down to see Kathleen's audio meditations

~

The last time I checked, the rest of the Universe is in 
good shape.  It's just Earth that's got the problem...

Neil deGrass Tyson

 

The Journey - Henri Bergson

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that
sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted
upon them from birth through social conditioning.  They begin
sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers.
Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them
a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their 
journey of awakening.  Each step of the journey is made by
following the heart instead of following the crowd and by
choosing [inner] knowledge over the veils of ignorance.

Henri Bergson
Daily Zen

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo Mystic Meandering

 

"Sacred Silence"...

I come to sit - called by "The Silence" within -
to rest in the deep Core of my Being,
my refuge...

to listen to the "Sacred Silence" of an Alive Cosmos;
to be held in that Rhythm ~ the in-breath and out-breath
of Life...

Lately,
I come to sit - to mourn the losses of life
and losses of ways of life in a a troubled world;
to mourn the living and the dead,
for the suffering they have endured;
for the collective grief - 
unending grief...

But mostly,
I come to sit - to feel the depths of Sacred Silence;
to be immersed in the vast Stillness of the Inner Cosmos;
to lay the burdens of the heart down -
and just rest...

Held and supported by the Universe in
some mysterious way...

Mystic Meandering
March 20, 2022

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Turning of the Heart - Matt Licata

[You may be asking] Why, after years or even decades of working
on myself, meditating, praying, surrendering, and going to therapy
can it seem like nothing is changing! Why am I always feeling
disappointed?  When do I reach the end, become fully awakened,
enlightened, totally healed!  When will it change?  Will the
longing ever be fulfilled?

...true 'transformation'...does not always conform to the ways we
thought it would all turn out.  Many discover the 'great liberation'
in the realization that they are not who they thought they were..

...true 'transformation' isn't possible without tending to our
essential vulnerability and the entirety of unfelt feelings and
aspects of ourselves we have kept out of conscious awareness.

It is not possible for us to 'awaken' our live without befriending
all parts of ourselves, calling them all back home into the larger
field of what we are.  It is an attunement to the entirety of what
we are...

Many of us have quite a lot of insight into our embedded patterns
[samskaras and conditioning] and "know" what we need to do
to 'awaken'.  But - despite all the "knowing", fundamental change
can remain elusive.

At some point it might only be a turning of the heart that has the
power and beauty and poetic impact to soothe the cosmic exhaustion,
wounds and pain of an unlived life, where love is revealed to be
the ultimate medicine, which can penetrate the deepest layers of 
our conditioning and felt sense of separation.

We must tend to our turning of the heart through the fire of our 
own direct experience - opening to our pain, our grief, our longing,
honoring the psyche and the soul.  Mere [intellectual] insight
alone will not reveal the deepest layers... instead [they are revealed]
through awareness illumined from within by the heart, by warmth,
and by love.

Matt Licata
from: A Healing Space

~

Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all
the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Rumi

~

Photo - Mysitc Meandering

 

Say I Am You - Rumi

I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.

I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel.
I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branched.
Silence, thought, and voice.

The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark off a stone, a flickering in metal.

Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose and nightingale lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift and the falling away.

What is and what is not.
You who know Jelaluddin,

You are the one in all...

Say I am you.

Jelaluddin Rumi
Coleman Barks Translation

~

What hurts the soul?
To live without tasting
the water of its own essence.

Rumi
Coleman Barks Version
from the Mathnawi I

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Your Spirit is Mingled with Mine - Hallaj

Art by Rassouli

"Your spirit is mingled with mine
as wine is mixed with water;
whatever touches you touches me.
In all the stations of the soul you are I."

Hallaj

The great Sufi mystic poet, Hallaj, was persecuted and 
eventually put to death by orthodox religious authorities
for poems like this, in which he seems to be equating himself
with God.

This is the danger faced by most mystics.  The sacred experience
is one of ecstatic union with the Divine.  Where do "you" cease
to be. and where does the Divine begin?  In mystical union,
these questions are artificial since the Divine is everywhere...

"Wine" here is not wine; it is the drink of Divine union.  It is the
"water" of the soul, awakened and flavored with the fermenting of
life.  This is the celestial drink of initiates: the amrita of the yogis,
the ambrosia of the Greeks, even the tea of our own poetry tea house...

When wine is poured into water, water takes on the nature of wine,
until no difference can be perceived. This is how he comes to the
final realization:

In all stations of the soul you are I.

When the divine wine pours into the clear water of the soul,
everything is turned to wine.  God and self become indistinguishable.
Rather, self is lost and only God remains.

Ivan Granger

Poetry Chaikhana

~

Art by Rassouli 

 

Gift from The Mystery - Danna Faulds

When I listen, words are everywhere,
riding the air currents like broad-winged hawks.
Poems are born in the molten centers
of stars.  Exploding into supernovas,
they travel light years to reach this spinning
ball of water and dirt, then wait eons more
to tell their tale.

When I'm lucky, a whole poem
arrives at once, sliding out of my psyche
as if it was mine, unexpectedly illuminating
this corner of the universe.

Words are everywhere when I grow still.
Whispered by lovers in mid-kiss
or sung as a lullaby; shouted in rage or prayed
by a saint whose face is lit with inner flames,
it's all fuel for my fire, grist for the turning
wheel of transformation, a gift from the
mystery to this finite world of form.

Danna Faulds
From: Limitless

~

Photo from the James Webb Space Telescope
from the Internet

 

Awe - Abraham Joshua Heschel

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization
that things not only are what they are but also stand, however
remotely, for something supreme.  Awe is a sense for the
transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery
beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world
intimations of the divine...to sense the ultimate in the
common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing
the stillness of the eternal.  What we cannot comprehend
by analysis, we become aware of in awe.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Homecoming - Mirabai Starr

I don't know about you, but I have grown weary of the 
self-improvement project.  The endless quest to uncover
and slay the host of inner demons who have been messing up
my plans for enlightenment, which I have imagined as some
pure land of perfect equanimity in which I hover over my
worldly concerns like a cartoon yogi, forever free from
narcissism and other embarrassing inclinations, reliably
dispensing compassion to the vulnerable, wisdom to the
ignorant, and a kind of sexy psychic luminescence to
anyone who comes into proximity with my purified and
 perfect (no)self.

Matt Licata's compassionate book, A Healing Space...affirms
that each of us has access to 'the outrageous intelligence and
bravery of the broken human heart' and the heart's ability to
return home.

This homecoming, as Matt shows us, is probably not what we
thought it would be when we signed up for the enlightenment
track.  We have been conditioned by our spiritual communities -
whether traditional religious institutions or alternative practice
spaces - to conquer certain feeling states in favor of some 
idealized realm where we are unmoved by these "lower
vibrations"...  Instead, he encourages us to share the truth of
our shattering so that we can become our own alchemists -
and learn to love reality however it is appearing in this
moment.

The ancient alchemists did not view the "base material" - as 
Matt calls our difficulties, our thoughts, our darker feelings
and emotions - to be transcended, but as 'the substance of the
gods' - Sacred, Beautiful and Loveable...  Matt's invitation is
to enter and inhabit those abandoned parts of ourselves and
our unlived lives as holy ground.

It's a revolutionary approach.  Rather than muscle our way
through spiritual disciplines, and therapeutic interventions,
we fall in love with our brokenness and welcome all the
orphaned parts of ourselves home.

Mirabai Starr
from the Forward to
A Healing Space:Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

Matt Licata, PhD

~

Photo from the Internet

 

The Song From Within - Robert Henri

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day,
when we see beyond the usual - become clairvoyant.  We reach
then into reality.  Such are the moments of our greatest happiness.
Such are the moments of our greatest vision.  At such times, there
is a song to which we listen.  It fills us with surprise.  We marvel
at it.  We would continue to hear it. But few are capable of holding
themselves in the state of listening to their song.  Intellectuality
steps in, and as the song within us is of the utmost sensitiveness,
it retires in the presence of the cold, material intellect.  It is
aristocratic and will not associate itself with the commonplace -
and we fall back into our ordinary selves.  Yet we live in the
memory of these songs, which in moments of intellectual 
inadvertence have been possible to us.  They are the pinnacles
of our experience and it is the desire to express these intimate
sensations, this song from within, which motivates the 
masters of all art.

Robert Henri
artist and writer in the 1800s
from his book The Art Spirit

from: HeronDance.org

Here's to the song from within.  That shy song that retreats
from the commonplace.  The song needs downtime, space,
in order to emerge.  It walks the slower, gentle path.

What does yours have to say, to sing?  Like a little flame,
easy to extinguish, needing nurturing, needing recognition.
In harmony with that song, I am alive, powerful, happy, at
peace.  I live in wonder if I make room for that song.

But it is shy, disappears at the slightest discontinuity.  Few
are capable of holding themselves in that state of listening.
I'm often not.  But it is, nevertheless, worthy.

Rod MacIver
artist and writer

from Rod's new Heron Dance website and e-journal.

During these times we all need inspiration and to
find our creative expression.  All you creatives, 
artists and writers might enjoy his inspirational
e-journal and reading about his "journey."

~

Photo from the Internet

 

The Decisive Element - Goethe

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am
the decisive element.  It is my personal approach that
creates the climate.  It is my daily mood that makes the
weather.  I possess tremendous power to make life
miserable or joyous.  I can be a tool of torture or an
instrument of inspiration.  I can humiliate or humor,
hurt or heal.  In all situations it is my response that
decides whether a crisis is escalated or deescalated, 
and a person is humanized or dehumanized.  If we
treat people as they ought to be, we help them
become what they are capable of becoming.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Competition and Compassion - Sharon Salzburg

Competition today is tantamount to a blood sport -
and not just on the playing field or in the ring.

The psychoanalytic theorist Karen Horney introduced
the concept of hyper-competitiveness as a neurotic
personality trait almost 70 years ago.  She characterized
the hyper competitive coping strategy as "moving against
people" (in contrast to moving toward or away from people).
Her observations are now all too evident in our culture.
Extreme us-versus-them behavior has created a lonely world.
There is always some new adversary to move against, so we
get locked into a vicious circle of measuring our strengthe
by disparaging others.

Competition is natural, a part of the human arsenal for survival,
but when it creates enmity, we need to question its power in our
lives.

This is where sympathetic joy - joy in the happiness of others -
comes in.  If we're in a competitive frame of mind, when
 something good happens to someone else, we think it 
somehow diminishes us.  It doesn't really, of course, but
being consumed with jealousy and envy clouds our judgement.
Even when we're not in the running, extreme competitiveness
makes us feel as if we were.

If we approach life from a place of scarcity, a mind-set
that emphasizes what we lack instead of what we have, then
anyone who has something we want becomes the enemy.

As a Buddhist monk Nyanaponika Thera says:

"It is compassion that removes the heavy bar,
opens the door to freedom,
makes the narrow heart as wide as the world..."

Looking closely at the life of someone we consider to be the
competition, we are bound to see hardships that the person
endured or understand how tenuous status and good fortune
can be. When we can connect with a perceived enemy on the
level of human suffering, winning or losing seems less important.

A few years ago I led a meditation group at an elementary school

in Washington, D.C.  The walls of the school corridors were
plastered with homilies:  Treat people the way you would like
to be treated.  Play fair.  Don't hurt others on the inside or the
outside. The message that stopped my short, however, was
Everyone can play.

Sharon Salzburg
Buddhist Teacher

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

(and photo too)

 

You Are A Marvel - Pablo Casals

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the
universe, a moment that will never be again.  And what do we
teach our children?  We teach them two and two make four,
and that Paris is the capital of France.  When will we also
teach them what they are?  We should say to each of them:
Do you know what you are?  You are a marvel.  You are
unique.  In all the years that have passed, there has never
been another child like you.  Your legs, your arms, your 
clever fingers, the way you move.  You may become a 
Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven.  You have the
capacity for anything.  Yes, you are a marvel.  And when you
grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you,
a marvel?  You must work, we must all work, to make the
world worthy of its children.

Pablo Casals

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo from the James Webb Space Telescope
University Today

 

The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of the wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry
from: Collected Poems

with thanks to Beyond the Fields We Know

~

Photo - Cate Kerr
from Beyond the Fields We Know