Living Silence - Robert Sardello

There is a Living Silence that hears the cry of the Soul.

Each of us has a companion-presence.  Something that is
always with us.  The companion-presence is Silence.
We need to nurture companionship with it [commune with it].

Silence was here before everything else, and it envelopes
everything else.  Silence is prior to sound, not the cessation
of sound.  If we drop into the quietness [within] for just a moment,
we feel the presence of Silence as an invitation.

As we accept the invitation and enter the mystery of Silence,
its presence resonates through the fibers of our flesh while
extending beyond the flesh to the deepest depths of the Soul
inwardly, and to the outermost reaches of the Cosmos
outwardly.  The inward silence of Solitude meets up with the

Great Silence of Cosmic Wisdom.  When we don't cultivate
the meeting point, we lose access to the presence
of the Silence.  Without Silence we are lost and cannot get still
enough to find our way back.

Silence bears the wholeness we are looking for...
Silence goes to the deepest depths of the Soul...

[In communion with the Silence] we feel a new attunement to
Spirit as a directly felt reality.  We have a bodily perception of
being welcomed into the vastness and fecundity of Silence. 
When we find the entry into the large stillness our lives are
irrevocably changed, a transition takes place.  The experience
comes with astonishing intimacy, that feels like the finding of
a long lost beloved.

Silence is palpable.  It's a living presence. It has a rhythm all
its own.  The currents of Silence weave polarities and opposites
and contradictions together.  Within Silence everything resonates
in true intimacy and mystery.

Our Soul connection with Silence is a form of sympathetic
resonance with the currents of Silence [the rhythm and pulsing
of Silence].  We enter into the deepest feeling of communing...

We, along with everything else, are within Silence.
We are held within a tender, loving invisible presence...
A vivid Presence of Silence...

This realm of Silence is pregnant with the ever-living Mystery.
It is the deepest feeling of communing, touched by the 
Ineffable, that keeps us intimately bound with the truth of our
Core Being, the very Essence of our Being; an interiority that
has been waiting for us.

Robert Sardello

Excerpts from: Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Caregiver to the Soul - a meandering

I am on a different journey now,
have been for the last several months...

It's a journey of Divine Descent,
into the inner caverns,
the deepest interiors of Myself,
into the interiority of the Soul...

Along the way I have encountered
the Shadow-lands of old traumas,
old emotional wounds, etc., and what are
considered the "dark" emotions;
engaging in negative meanderings of the mind.
It's been a challenging passage.

And in that descent to the core of my Being,
I have learned that the portals to the Soul
are not necessarily illumined;
sometimes they are through the dark places;
passageways through the catacombs of the Soul.

Standing in the kitchen this morning
I unexpectedly heard this phrase,
from the Inner Voice -
"Caregiver to the Soul."

I felt uplifted, inspired - relieved, released
from the darkness that has shrouded me -
if only for that moment...

And now I must explore how to be the
Caregiver to my Soul
listening deeply to the deeper needs
of the Soul - to what nourishes and feeds
the Soul life...

Mystic Meandering
Sept. 27, 2024

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Portals to the Soul - Matt Licata

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go through the dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.

Stanley Kunitz
The Testing Tree

~

As we move through the second half of life, a new voice will
often emerge, pouring out through our longing, our grief, our
anger, and our disappointment.  A figure from deep in the soul.

To hear and respond to the call, we have to slow down and 
listen through the veil, beyond the noise and density of the
collective...

It takes courage to listen to the soul and to take it seriously.
To cultivate a real devotion to the messages it is sending us.
We are called into this devotional place by way of our
dreams, our study and practices, and through prayer, ritual,
dance, art, creativity, and being a parent, a teacher, a lover,
and a friend (and Caregiver).

It can be a lonely journey at times, if there is no one who can
truly understand us.  We turn to look for the Friend though they
are not there.

But the Friend is near, even if unable to be seen.

Holding and tending this aloneness, and the grief that
accompanies it, lies at the very heart of the process of
 death and rebirth, and the truth that all healing is
relational in its essence.

There can be no unity or oneness without there first being
an experience of separation.  Otherwise, union would have no
meaning.  They co-arise together, where a subsequent union
lays the seeds for a more subtle separation, and then a more
subtle union, and on and on.

Separation and multiplicity are just as holy as oneness and
union; they are equally valid emanations of the Beloved.

There is no end to the depths of the human heart.  We don't
wiggle into some sustained transcendent state where we're
"permanently" awakened, gone beyond the reality that the
Beloved will pull the rug out from underneath us, in order
to draw us nearer, and to reveal more of its essence.

In the end, [The Beloved] seems quite uninterested in our
fantasies of permanent transcendence.

Even as we may yearn to rise above our embodied
sensitivities, emotional wounding, and relational trauma,
on the alchemical path they are the prima materia, the
required matter, and portals into the depths of the Soul.

Matt Licata

~

Vortex Art - Mystic Meandering
2011

 

Suffering - Francis Weller

No one escapes suffering in this life.
None of us is exempt from loss, pain, illness and death.
How is it that we have so little understanding of [and empathy for]
these essential experiences?  How is it that we have attempted
to keep grief separated from our lives and only begrudgingly 
acknowledge its presence at the most obvious of time, such as
a funeral.

It is the accumulated losses of a lifetime that slowly weigh us
down - the times of rejection, the moments of isolation when we felt
cut off from the sustaining touch of comfort and love.  It is an ache
that resides in the heart, the faint echo calling us back to the times of
loss.  We are called back, not so much to make things right, but to
acknowledge what happened to us.

Grief asks that we honor the loss and, in doing so, deepen our
capacity for compassion.  When grief remains unexpressed, however,
 it  hardens, becomes as solid as stone.  We, in turn, become rigid and
stop moving in rhythm with the soul.... with the flow of life.  Grief is
part of the dance.

As we begin to pay attention, we notice that grief is never far from
our awareness.  We become aware of the many ways it arrives in
our daily lives. It is the blue mood that greets us upon waking.  It
is the melancholy that shades the day in muted tones.  It is the
recognition of time's passing, the slow emptying of our days.  It
is the searing pain that erupts when someone close to us dies -
It is the confounding grief when our life circumstances are
shattered by the unexpected....  the ground beneath us opens,
shaken by violent rumblings.  Grief enfolds our lives....

It is essential for us to welcome grief, whatever form it takes.
When we do, we open ourselves to our shared experiences in life.
Grief is our common bond.  Opening to our sorrow connects us
with everyone, everywhere.  There is no gesture of kindness that
is wasted, no offering of compassion that is useless.  We can be
generous to every sorrow we see.  It is sacred work.

Francis Weller

from The Wild Edge of Sorrow:
Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief;
The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Dancing Cry of the Soul - Rumi

Come to me, and I shall dance with you
In the temples, on the beaches, through the crowded streets
Be you man or woman, plant or animal, slave or free
I shall show you the brilliant crystal fires, shining within
I shall show you the beauty deep within your Soul
I shall show you the path beyond Heaven.

Only dance, and your illusions will blow in the wind
Dance, and make joyous the love around you
Dance, and your veils which hide the Light
Shall swirl in a heap at your feet.

Rumi
Excerpt from: "The Dancing Cry of the Soul"

~

Photo from the internet