Humility - Brian Doyle

 

You cannot control anything.
You cannot order or command everything.
You cannot fix and repair everything.
You cannot protect [people] from pain
and loss and tragedy and illness.
You cannot be sure you will always be
employed, or healthy, or relatively sane.

All you can do is face the world with quiet grace.

When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story
in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or
several at once, sometimes;  when we are older we take on
other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you
and I both know men and women who become trapped in
the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately
imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives simply to
escape who they no longer wish to be;  but finally, I think, if
we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with
humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief....
and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and
true about humility.

Humility does not mean self abnegation, lassitude, detachment;
it's more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which
does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly
ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture.  You
must trust that you being you matters somehow...

[and that]

.....pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy...

[and]
You do your best to reach out tenderly and touch and elevate as
many people as you can reach...

You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath
you draw.  Humility is the road to love.  Humility, maybe, is
love.  That could be.  I wouldn't know; I'm a muddle and a 
conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder,
trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards
of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.

Brian Doyle

Excerpts from the chapter - "The Final Frontier"
From: One Long River Song

~

Photo from the Internet

Grace - Chuck Surface

Grace does not hold an abacus in one hand,
Tallying karma,
Or a Rubik's cube in the other,
Challenging you to "Figure it out."

Grace knows nothing of such cruelties.

Grace is the power that comes alive
When Attention, wandering in the world,
Turns inward,
In quest for The Heart's Desire.

From the first awakening of Longing,
To the first turning inward,
through the long, wandering trek,
And the vanishing into Pure Being...

Is not everything the functioning of Grace?

Grace is the power of "Fruitioning",
Of the seed to Blossom,
Of the ember to Flame,
Of Longing to Fulfillment.

Grace is the gravity of our own Pure Being,
Pulling "i".
To its Ultimate Oblivion...
And Benediction.

The Heart's Longing
And the mind's Wonder
Arise from Grace,
As Grace.

Is not everything the functioning of Grace?

Grace, as my Heart speaks it,
Is not a "consequence"
Of conditionality,
Of causality.

Do we choose to have a Heart
Drunk with Longing?
Do we choose to have a mind
Moved by wonder?

It is Grace that calls us,
Grace that moves us,
And Grace that sustains us,
Until we Vanish...

In its welcoming arms.

Chuck Surface

Facebook

~

Photo taken by my brother
at Sunday River Ski Resort
in Maine

 

The Way to The Woods - Wendell Berry

Sabbath 1985. V

[.....]

What is the way to the woods, how do you get there?
By climbing through the 6 day's field,
kept in all the body's years, the body's
sorrow, weariness, and joy.
By passing through the narrow gate
on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass
of the body's life
gives way
to
the high, original
standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow,
the shadow of the grace of the strait
way's ending, the shadow of the mercy
of light...

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come in among these trees you must leave behind
the six day's world,
all of it,
all of its plans
and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool,
alone,
expecting nothing,
remembering nothing...

Wendell Berry
Excerpt from: A Timbered Choir

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Graced With Gratitude...

Gratitude arises
like a warm flame
in the Heart;
a flame that
comes alive
on its own
from within

Overtaking me by surprise...

It's a gratitude of
unknown origin -
not contrived,
or cultivated,
but
deeply felt in the
core of my Being;
only awareness is 
needed...

A gratitude
not for being alive,
but for Aliveness ItSelf.
for the Aliveness that
is Life;
that dances and sings
the Cosmos
into being;
that imbues existence
with LIFE!

For the color and movement
of life being lived
in every minute detail;
for the opening and
unfoldment of life
that has its own
course,
its own
way,
unfolding Itself in
total freedom of Being

I am truly graced with Gratitude -

beyond words...

Mystic Meandering
October 2015

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Poetry is Given - May Sarton

Poetry seems to me so much a true work
of the soul... Poetry [is] given...
In a state of grace, when the deep channels are open,
and when they are, when I am both profoundly "stirred"
and balanced, the poetry comes as a gift from powers
beyond my will...

The poem is primarily a dialogue with the Self,
and the novel a dialogue with others.  They come
from entirely different modes of being...

May Sarton
From - The Journal of a Solitude

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Grace Comes...

Grace comes unbidden...

Her soft Presence comforts in the
coldest dawn and darkest night,

and sits with us when we are broken,

beaten down by the "life game"...

She is the antidote for an aching heart
and struggling body...

She hears your silent tears...
and walks with you...

Grace brings you love and kindness
to endure the crosswinds that bite...

Grace comes...

to bind the wounds from those
who tried to suffocate your voice,
who tried to kill your spirit...

She softens the heart
and clears the pain from your vision...

She is always with us,
even in the death of the body.
She is "the beautiful woman sitting on
the fence," come to take you "home."
or to your next "journey" - wherever
that may be...

She is singing your homing call...

There is nothing to do but surrender
and let Grace sing her song of Love
to your weary heart...

Listen...

Mystic Meandering
April 8, 2021

~

The reference to"the beautiful woman on the fence"
is something my mother experienced during her
dying process 3 1/2+ years ago...
Hospice said she was hallucinating, but we knew
she was "seeing."
She saw a beautiful woman sitting on the fence out her window,
at the top of a small incline.  On many occasions she said:
"the beautiful woman on the fence
has come to take me on my next journey."

Grace Comes...

~

Photo - blurred section of a painting
by Rod MacIver

 

Keep Turning the Page...

Life is always as it is:
the tragedy, the heartbreak,
illness and death...
Joy and sorrow,
the politics, and the 
games that they play - oye...

I am like an old house now,
not yet abandoned
by its inhabitant,
but creaking and
falling apart...

Yet, I'm not ready to
pack up my life and
move out...
But I grieve the loss
of health and energy,
motivation and strength,
dexterity and nimbleness,
mental acuity, and emotional
bandwidth - and -
a sense of "Aliveness."
Fatigued by constant
distractions on the superficial surface
of life, creating chaos and agitation
that weigh heavy on my heart...

And so I pause
at the Inner Gate,
entrusting myself to,
and communing with the
deep Inner Silence of Being,
breathing me,
until my time here is up,
while life keeps turning its
pages, going from one chapter
to the next...

I bow to Grace...

Mystic Meandering

Aug 18, 2022

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Epiphany - 2013

It seems that my "spiritual path" has been laced with small
"epiphanies" and "divine flashes" of awareness, and "mini
awakenings" over the years.  I had one of those moments
back in 2013 when standing in my backyard.  I had stepped
outside to be in nature for a while, connecting with the stillness
and silence - taking it all in - noticing and feeling the connection.
I was in the process of taking some pictures of the shadows 
that the late afternoon sun in November was making on the fence,
when suddenly the words: "There is nothing but 'God'" ran
unbidden and unexpectedly through the silence of my being.
Say what!  There was an immediate sense of profound peace,
contentment, and joy in my heart.  I even started to giggle to
myself.  But I was also completely shocked by the word - 
"God" - and my very tangible felt experience of it.

I had not used the "God" language in years, after leaving the
religion of my childhood some 26 years before this, as it holds
imagery of my Christian upbringing of a person in the clouds
with white beard, meting out judgment.  It has so many old
paradigms, somewhat fundamentalist "religious" connotations
from my past, which made it all the more surprising that this
was the word that floated through.  If the inner "voice" had said:
 "All there is, is "Awareness," or "Consciousness, " or "Pure Being,"
 I would have gone, of course! - as those are the words that I often

use, abstract as they are. I also have used words like Buddha Nature,
The Divine,The Self, Brahman, The Ineffable, The Eternal, or
The Infinite. But I was jolted awake by the clear use of the word
"God." As this phrase ran through me I had the image of a deep
golden light, like a sunset, that ran across the screen of my mind,
as if to show me the depth and vastness of the word.  As it wasn't
 the persona "God" image of my childhood.  No, it was an
 incomprehensible sense of vast, expansive, all-inclusive, infinite,
 ubiquitous, Alive Presence, with which I felt an immediate sense of
  inherent communion - not one which needed to be sought after,
 but that was already actively happening...  And with that
realization came profound sense of Grace...

It was also realized that it doesn't matter if there is a sense of
a "me" or "no-me"; if one "concentrates" or not, or meditates,
or not.  It is inconsequential.  It was just realized that all there is,
is Infinite Existence that just IS - no matter what name or
qualities we give It...  or how we discover it for ourselves.

_/\_

Mystic Meandering
2013

~

Art: Mystic Meandering
Ethereal Vortex
Done with fingers and Craypas oils
2010

 

Sail Away - Fred LaMotte

No writing on your sail.
No affirmations, not even "I."
Just let it ripple
in the cool steady breeze,
this breath.

The sail itself is the name of the Goddess.
You can stop rowing now.
Let the current carry you.
Throw the map away, the chart
of nadis and chi lines,
chakras and postures.
Who knows where you're going?
Destinations don't matter anymore.
Just sailing is grace.
Merely breathing in this body
is adventure.
And the sparkling sun on living water?
The beauty that shines
from your heart.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance
and photo of art too...

Art: Leonid Afremov

 

The Path of Time - Andrew Colliver

Mercy, there have been revelations.
Grace, there has been realization.  Still you must
travel the path of time and circumstance.

The further you go, the more it comes back to paying attention.
The rough skin of the tallowwood, the trade routes of lorikeets,
a sky lifting behind the afternoon clouds.  Staying close to the
texture of things.

People can go before you and talk all they want,
but only one thing makes sense:
the way the world enters and finds its voice in you:
the place you are free.

Andrew Colliver

with thanks to Being Silently Drawn

~

Photo - from the internet

 

Terrible/Beautiful - Fred LaMotte

Everyone carries a dark secret.
We do not know its name.
But it's the same secret in all of us.
Terrible. Beautiful.

Sometimes we smile to hide it
because we are each afraid
that this is our secret alone.

But I know that your smile
covers the darkness
because it is mine.

[.....]

It is better that you look into my tears.
It is better that I look into yours.
The night embraced
blossoms into dawn.
A strange grace, is it not?

[.....]

How the soft wound
of courage glows
through this not trying
to hide it.

And a deeper secret:
I gaze from your heart,
you gaze from mine.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Go Further - Danna Faulds

Go further than your mind can reach,
further than your words can speak.
Go further than you know, outside of
your control.  Break your conditioning...

Like a twig plucked from a tree, carried a
great distance, and woven into a crow's
nest, you have no idea of your real destiny.

Keep going until there is nothing left, and
you are empty and bereft.  Hold that open
space.  Inhabit the place of not knowing
until grace tugs on your awareness and
says "Follow me into the center of chaos
and serenity.  Follow me to what you've
always been and always will be."

The truth of you is far beyond what you
imagine, simultaneously deathless and
here to be lived, then surrendered back
into the Infinite.

Danna Faulds
From: Limitless

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

You can stop worrying now - Czeslaw Milosz

In advanced age, my health worsening,
I woke up in the middle of the night,
and experienced a feeling of happiness
so intense and perfect that in all my life
I had only felt its premonition.
It didn't obliterate consciousness:
the past which I carried was there,
together with my grief.
And it was suddenly included,
was a necessary part of the whole.

As if a voice were repeating:

"You can stop worrying now;
everything happened just as it had to.

You did what was assigned to you,
and you are not required anymore
to think of what happened long ago."

The peace I felt was a closing of accounts
and was connected with the thought of death.
The happiness on this side was
like an announcement of the other side.
I realized that this was an undeserved gift
and I could not grasp by what grace
it was bestowed on me.

Czeslaw Milosz

original title "Awakened"

with thanks to Being Silently Drawn

~

Photo from the internet

 

Fierce Grace - Matt Licata

The Soul is always communicating with us.  The great Friend
is always looking for us, in the hope of drawing us nearer,
but often in ways that are unexpected and even bewildering
to the part of us that believes it's in control.

There are times in our lives when the most precious beliefs
and realizations fall apart and dissolve...  What was so clear
only days or weeks ago is transformed to dust.

In order to get our attention, the Soul must at times upset and
dissolve the status quo, turning inside out the dreams and
fantasies of me and the life I thought I was living... causing us
to see that perhaps we have no idea who and what we are, what
a relationship is, what the Divine is, and where we will find
meaning.

The reassembling of our world is a sacred process...

As we deepen our inquiry, we might start to see this activity
of somatic and psychic restructuring as the expression of a
certain kind of grace... not the sweet, flowy, and expansive
grace that is our favorite kind, but a grace that is fierce and
wild and can have a certain disassembling energy to it.

It is the [fierce] grace of Kali, or that of the wrathful Tibetan
goddesses, a raging grace, a creative and destructive
reorganization of consciousness.
But it is grace nonethless.

Matt Licata 

~

FunQi Art - Mystic Meandering

2012

 

Grace Comes...

 Grace comes unbidden...
Her soft Presence comforts in the
coldest dawn and darkest night,
and sits with us when we are broken,
beaten down by the "life game"...

She is the antidote for an aching heart
and struggling body...

She hears your silent tears...
and walks with you...

Grace brings you love and kindness
to endure the crosswinds that bite...

It's all Grace -
come to bind the wounds from those
who tried to suffocate your voice,
who tried to kill your spirit...

She softens the heart
and clears the pain from your vision...

She is always with us,
even in the death of the body.
She is "the beautiful woman sitting on
the fence," come to take you "home,"
or to your next "journey" -
wherever that may be...

Grace has come, Grace has come!

She is singing her love song!

There is nothing to do but surrender
and let Grace sing her song of Love
to the weary heart...

Listen...

Mystic Meandering
April 8, 2021

The reference to "the beautiful woman on the fence"
is something my mother experienced during her
dying process 2 years ago...

Hospice said she was hallucinating, but we knew she was *seeing.*
She saw a beautiful woman sitting on the fence out her window,
at the top of a small incline, on many occasions.
She said: "the beautiful woman on the fence
has come to take me on my next journey."

Grace Comes...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Insistent Grace - Stephen Levine & Ivan Granger

 There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is an insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

Stephen Levine
Original title: "Millennium Blessing"

via Death Deconstructed

~

Commentary by Ivan Granger

Most of us spend our entire lives avoiding that inner opening.
Most of the time it is a quiet itch at the back of the awareness
we squirm and turn away from.  And when it really presses
on us, it can inspire terror, as if we were facing death.

It is the death of our old world view, the death of patterned
awareness, the death of our limited notion of who we are.  All
we thought ourselves to be stops - and so it is a sort of death.
To feel that grace approaching, to welcome it, requires a sort
of courage.

It requires courage, and surrender.  We have this idea that
spiritual opening is a terrible effort... No...  That unfolding
wants to occur within us.  The only effort is to let go of our
endless strategies to halt the process.  We all feel it, a gentle
prodding to let the heart open, to know ourselves truly, to be
present and radiate ourselves into the world.  It is insistent,
trying to happen within us.  Call it grace, if you like.  The
question presented to us: Do we courageously accept the
invitation or not?

For those of us who live in contemporary society, how hard
it is to stop the ticking of the clock?  From such an early age
we internalize the sense of time and progress and deadlines.
Yet, in doing so, we forget that these are all just concepts,
just one way to understand the unfolding of being and
experience.  That sense of time is a powerful tool for doing
and accomplishment, but it isn't inherently "real."  It doesn't
have much to do with who or what we are.  There is a flow of
days and months, but they are the surface current of a much
deeper timelessness.

It's fascinating how we use the hyperactivity of thought to
define the world, to frame our perception of the world, and
in some ways to limit our notion of the world.  The other
thing about thought:  It creates time.  When thought settles
down, we discover timelessness.  And as the poet says, the
mind comes to rest, not in the head, but in the heart.

And we remember.  It is not through intellection but through
stillness that we remember.  Look at the word "remember."
Re-member.  To remember is to finally see how apparently
separated reality actually fits together in a single body.
Discursive thought can only ever examine pieces of the whole.
To remember is to have the full vision of Wholeness, as
things actually are.  But this vision is found in timelessness
and stillness, through the quiet mind unfiltered.

Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

What the Heart Really Wants...

 What the Heart really wants is...

to know "The Sacred" - as Friend...

When we take our seat in the Heart...

we find the Friend...

The Sacred is here...

When we take our seat in the Heart...

we are filled from within...

Embodied with Her Grace...

The Sacred is here...

When we take our seat in the Heart...

our face is Her Face, our body is Her Body...

We are reclaimed...

The Sacred is here...

~

Just take your seat...

You have found the Friend...

The Sacred is here...

Mystic Meandering
Feb. 7, 2021

With thanks to Mitch Rosacker of
Self Discovery Studio
for the line:

"When we take our seat in the Heart,
we find the Friend..."

Note: the line "The Sacred is here..." is
meant to be read as a whisper...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Your Body Is The Universe - Fred LaMotte

Photo from Dreamstime.com 

Your body is not a tomb, or a trap, or punishment.
Your body is the universe inviting you to wake up and dance.

Your body has no edges. It is an ocean of energy expanding
in waves of breath, teeming with stars, swirling with galaxies,
overflowing with the very rim of time and space.  And your
dance can be wild as a whirlwind, or as quiet as a heartbeat.
You need not even move; your body is moving anyway, hosts
of cells, countless atoms in the marvelous ballet of
incarnation...

The axis of infinity runs up your hollow spine, a silver thread
of silk to tether your skull to the most distant star, and your
belly to the fire of darkness in the center of the planet.

Your body is a lightening bolt, connecting heaven and earth.
In truth, it is only the limited mind that insists on
distinguishing the spiritual from the physical...

But please, don't mistake the mind for the Self.

You are not the mind.

Bathe in the sea of the Breath...

You are the cosmos, flowing in gratitude through the energy of
your flesh, dissolving your mind into the infinite sky.  Be bold.
Leap into the unfathomable ocean of your body.  Live in the
silent grace beyond thought.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

The Sacred is Here...

 The Sacred is Here...

  The Sacred is Here...

   The Sacred is Here...

Om Namah Shivaya

 

~*~

She gently and quietly invites me
deeper into Her inner realms...

She infuses me with Her Grace...
from within

She is my guru, my teacher -
ever teaching through Her Quiet Presence,
Her soft energies, and whispers of
Love.

Mystic Meandering
Jan. 5, 2021

_/\_

Om Namah Shivaya is a Sanskrit phrase
meaning
Salutations to the auspicious one

~

Personal Note: This poem emerged as a result
of direct experience of the movement of "The Sacred"
within during meditation, which I have also called
"The Mystery", or "The Silence" - not based on
belief or concept, but just being open to that which
enlivens us from within - The Presence of the Ineffable.
"She" also whispered: "Always come back to the
feeling of The Presence within."

"She" is a reference to how I experience the energy of
"The Sacred", which feels feminine to me.
"She" is always Here.. :)

_/\_

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Morning Grace - W.S. Merwin

 It is at last any morning
not answering to a name
I wake before there is light
hearing once more that same
music without repetition
or beginning playing
away into itself
in silence like a wave
a union in its own
key that I seem
to have heard before I
was listening but by the time
I hear it now it is gone
as when on a morning
alive with sunlight
almost at the year's end
a feathered breath a bird
flies in at the open window
then vanishes leaving me
believing what I do not see

W.S. Merwin
From Shadow of Sirius
original title of poem - "Grace Note"

~

Photo taken by my brother in MA