Just Below Our Fear - Stephen Levine

There are words in us
that don't know how
to get to the surface.
Words hidden in our marrow
afraid to show themselves
concerned the world will end
it they are uttered.
Words that cross
the river of pain
that wish to tell the world
that love is hidden
just below our fear.

And some of these words
sometimes find their way
to live among us
in the trust to hear them,
words that spin our compass...
words we never trusted to exist.

Words hide in the strangest places,
under stones, in clouds,
in a moment of a friend's kindness,
in a moment of generosity;
in poems beginning their first line
climbing happily into the heart singing,
how close the moon comes
when we trust the night.
Words even hide in other words.
Mercy hides in the hesitant pause,
questioning how much can be trusted
to the tongue, to the pen,
invoking their true voice
rise to the surface
to sing their original song...

Stephen Levine

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Listening Within the Heart - Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

...listening within the Heart attunes us to The Beloved.
By listening within the Heart we develop the ear of the Heart,
the inner listening of the soul that can perceive at this higher
frequency.  Still, such listening requires both attentiveness and
discrimination, as it is not always easy to discriminate between
the voice of the ego and the voice of The Beloved.  But there is
a distinct difference.  The words of the ego and mind belong to
duality; the words of the Heart carry the imprint of oneness
 [wholeness]. In the Heart there is no argument, no you and me,
 just an unfolding [attitude of] oneness [unity].  The Heart
embraces a difficulty, the ego takes sides...

Listening, waiting for Love's words, turns us away from our
own needs to being attentive to the higher need. [the need of the soul]
In our need we call to The Beloved, and then wait at the doorway
of the Heart, listening for an answer.  But gradually, imperceptibly,
this inner listening becomes more important than our own need.
Our questions become fewer, our inner attention grows.
The Beloved begins to nourish us [the soul's need] with the response...

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Sufi Mystic

from: Prayer of the Heart

[brackets mine]

Via: No Mind's Land

~

Photo - light through Venetian Blinds
taken by my husband...

Love Awaits You - Christiane Singer

When there is nothing left,
when you are on your last adventure,
in deteriorating descent,
[from disease/illness]
the mystery of suffering
[is that it] takes you to transparency
where there is only Love...
...liberates the power of Love...
in our lives...

All the dams break and
there is nothing but Love
all around you...


At the end of the worst,
Love awaits you...

There is nothing to fear
...receive Love...

Love is not an emotion,
it is the substance of life itself.

Christiane Singer
French Writer/Novelist

Excerpts from her video
"The Gifts of Suffering"

~

She writes:

I wrote a book on Les Ages de la vie.  I tried to show these
metamorphoses of being in the course of life.  It is obvious
that all this is only valid if one has learned to die in the course
of existence.  And these occasions are given us so often.
All crises, separations, and diseases, and all forms,
everything, everything, everything,
all invites us to learn and leave behind.
Death will take away only what we wanted to possess.
The rest, it has no hold on the rest.
And it is in this progressive deprivation that an
 immense freedom is created...

Christiane died of Cancer in 2007 at the age of 64

There Is Always An Open Doorway - Licata

Perhaps Life has no interest in us living up to some image.
It doesn't need or want us to be "perfect", or "divine",
 or "awakened", or "healed."  Or manifesting all the things
 we think we want...
It is only ever offering its invitation to fall heart-first
into an immense field of not-knowing - not knowing how to live,
not knowing how to accept, not knowing how to "get awakened",
not knowing how to "heal," and not knowing how to resolve
the ways of love...
And in this not-knowing,
life is there waiting for us,
 revealing its mysteries...

You are so exhausted, so tired of chasing around some fantasy
of a "spiritual" life that you were told was the right one
by some teacher, author, or expert who has figured it out
and come to some fundamental resolution to love
and its untamed creative wildness.

You are longing for rest.
To rest in your True Being.

In the very center of your heart,
there is always an open doorway.

It has nothing to do with wiggling into some conditioned
state of consciousness, other than the pure one that is here,
or with seeking some mythical sustained transcendent experience,
or with any sort of movement beyond the messy world of intimacy,
confusing unresolvable love, and human vulnerability.
It wants so badly for you to walk through, to meet for the first time,
this unbearable longing to go home,
to behold for the first time the
miracle of this precious human body,
of *these* thoughts,
of *these* feelings,
of *these* passing states of consciousness,
exactly as they have been given by an unseen grace.

For in just one moment of caring enough -
of somehow resisting the call to exit this experience for another -
what you see is that it is all made of love,
crafted out of the substance of love,
all the way through,
from inside-out and outside-in.
And no matter what the details,
love has somehow configured itself
as your unique life,
and has offered itself as a gift...
waiting for you to enter inside and hold it,
exactly as it is...

Matt Licata

(Matt's words, my format)

Learning about Love...

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves,
and not to twist them to fit our image.
Otherwise we love only the reflection of
ourselves we find in them…”

Thomas Merton

“You have to learn to get up from the table
when love is no longer being served…”

Nina Simone

“Love arises when you die into
the Unknown Mystery of Being -
when you realize that Love
has no intention to change you,
it has no agenda…”

Adyashanti

What Lies at the Bottom of the Barrel...

I’ve been experiencing more of the “Winter Blues” lately. Have been feeling a bit melancholy, especially at twilight. I thought I hit the bottom of the barrel a week ago, but no, there was more, and it’s been very intense. So I had to look into the bottom of the barrel. There was something unexpected waiting.

Her visit wasn’t convenient; this being the Holiday Season and all where one is not supposed to be melancholy, dark, and sad – but joyous and cheerful. It’s not a switch one can just turn on, or off. Ho-Ho-Ho. I didn’t intend to feel this way. She just showed up unexpected one evening and stayed 5 days.

Sometimes she was felt as heartache – a longing for love; sometimes a wrenching gut feeling of the pain and grief of an undefined loss that felt like a crushing pressure. She was every memory of sadness as a child – that usually occurred at twilight - and losses of loved ones over the years – remembered at twilight. It was as if I was being emptied out of every painful feeling and experience from the past. As uncomfortable as it was, I stayed open to her. I knew deep inside she was a “guide from beyond”, as Rumi calls it, and so I welcomed her in each day, sat with her and listened.

It was revealed that “Melancholy” – this Divine Miss M - was really a deep longing for *living;* for engaging fully with Life!; for connecting with and experiencing love for life, communing with life *in* the living of it, and allowing myself to be *absorbed* by Life living me.

I reflected that life has primarily been a series of events, people, drama, crises that I have reacted to, struggled with, and against, and felt threatened by over the years – consequently missing opportunities to love; withdrawing sometimes instead from the harshness and difficulties of living, thinking there was something “better” in being on a “spiritual path.” But I recognized that I never fully engaged with Life! And now there is this impulse to fully engage – to creatively engage. There is a sense of urgency to *feel* life happening, to pay attention to life – in the waning years of life… The “how” has yet to be revealed.

After these insights, in sitting meditation, I relaxed and dropped into the Silence within, as I usually do. And in a fleeting moment I became inwardly aware of what lies at the bottom of the barrel. It was/ is “love.” I know that sounds trite. It’s not “love” as we have come to know it. It’s not the “in love” kind of love that oscillates and changes; or the sweet ooey-gooey kind of love that is just words that drop from the tongue and onto the floor, missing the heart. It’s “The Beloved’s Love” – a steady, equanimous, sustaining love that is always present, never wavering. This “love” that lies at the bottom of every experience, thought, feeling, emotion, physical function etc., can only be described as a spacious openness in which everything occurs. Love enfolds life within Itself; is in a sense, “in love” with ItSelf – how could it not be. And we are the animation of that Love - loving. It turns out that “melancholy” (as with any feeling) is a portal, a gateway to - Love.

I only touched on this love briefly, fleetingly. In trying to capture it with my mind it escaped from view. But for a brief moment I was aware that Love resides in the depths of living – feelings and all. And what a surprise it was one morning to cut into a tomatoe and find this heart deep inside! The “gift” from beyond. :)

Melancholy stayed 4 more days – emptying me out and opening me up. And Love merely *allowed* melancholy to be here, embracing her - until she melted away into the twilight - the space between the light and the dark…

The twilight keeps calling to me to open to the space where Love abides – to keep recognizing it. Now I go outside and walk at twilight - not with melancholy – but *feeling* life living. And in experiencing life intimately, I experience the spaciousness of Love that lies at the bottom of everything!

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival…

A joy, a depression, a meanness.
Some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all,
even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture.

Still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi


“the longing you feel for this love
comes from inside you…”

“Love is the cure.
For your pain will keep giving birth
to more pain
until your eyes constantly exhale love
as effortlessly as you body
yields to its scent.”

Rumi


“Rumi tells us that the supreme secret of
the inner journey is the path of love.
If we can possess our whole heart
with contemplation of ‘The Beloved’
we will experience the wonders
and beauty of the universe.”

(I don’t remember where I got this :)

"Love Waiting"

I’ve been wanting a dog for a few months now. The thought of getting a dog excites me for some reason. After our cat, affectionately nicknamed “Yodi Bodhi,” died last August after 18+ years I said I was not going to have another animal. It was too much responsibility, demanding a lot of time and energy in the last 8 years of his life, and tied us down in many ways. But – here we are 8 months later and I’m swooning for a dog. There can never be another cat like “Yoda”, so it must be a dog – but not just any dog.

And then I read a blogpost over at 108zenbooks that did me in. Briefly, it was about a dog named Hachiko who, after his owner died while at work, went to the train station every day for *9 years* to wait for his “owner”/life companion to come home! (Until he himself died on the steps!) Genju describes this as “love waiting!” OMG. My Heart started quaking open. Actually my Heart has been experiencing a lot of little quakes lately. I’ll call them pre-shocks, as if warning me of the big quake to come. And I can feel it, the big quake is coming. This intuiting of the big Heart Quake is causing an anxious quiver to run throughout my body. I want to run even before it has actually happened. And I can barely sit with it long enough to get in touch with it before wanting to get up and eat or watch TV or whatever else I can *consume* to numb this deep quaking of the Heart. Even writing about it is creating the RUN response!

I know that having a dog will quake my Heart and crack it open – full quake. I know it will. And yet I want it. Am I ready for that!?

So what is it that I *really* want? What is it that a dog represents for me? I think the phrase “love waiting” says it all… I want “love waiting” - that unconditional, tail wagging, love response that only dogs can give. I’ve tried with humans but it doesn’t seem to work out too well – humans tend to bite. :) And I’ve been known to send a few darts to the heart as well… But can I call a dog “love waiting?” How about “Buddha” – the *Essence* of “Love Waiting…” – or Being-Self, or Divine Mother, or Spirit, or Awareness, or…. You get the idea…

A dog doesn’t care about our baggage; doesn’t feel a need to argue or wrangle over words like “self” – "me" -“non-duality”, or the meaning of “Truth”, or “existence.” A dog *is* in many ways a reflection of “True Nature:” loving, accepting, open-hearted - just Be-ing Presence in the way that only dogs know how to do – “love waiting.” Sorry I just love that phrase.

I ask myself, so why is the thought of all this causing all this heart-quaking, this quiver in my being? What am I trying to avoid? What do I not want to see?

I have a sneaking suspicion it’s “Love Waiting” – but I’ll have to let you know after “The Quake…”

~*~