Balance - MacIver & Levey

Your inner world guides you without you knowing it.
Our thought patterns determine the quality of our lives.
That inner process works at the depth of each of us
carrying the meaning that has been trying to establish
itself in our existence.  It embodies the potential of who
we are when our life expresses itself as a whole.
Silence helps...

A sign of balance is a comfort with silence, both Silence
within and silence without.

Rod MacIver
Artist/Writer
Heron Dance

~

Balance can be sensed in terms of the waves of the Ocean.
...at a deeper level, the changing tides of such "waves" are balanced
by the profound reality of an unchanging "Ocean" within you;
Just as the Ocean is the water that forms all waves, 
The Ocean within you is the universal reality or essence
that dwells within all beings... 

[Some call this the Silence]
 Discovering the Ocean is vitally important for the
 discovery of balance, because it
provides a place of peace for you to return home to, despite
the chaos of the day.

...keep balanced on the waves of our challenging lives...

Joel and Michelle Levey
From: Living in Balance

~

Personal Note:  For many years the Inner Silence was my refuge.
Then life fell out of balance about 2 years ago through unexpected
life circumstances and I was unable to *access* the Silence,
or maintain balance, literally.
My energy and body are really out of whack.
Returning to doing my funky art vortexes seems to be helping
to find a sense of inner balance again, but I need to rediscover
the deep Inner Silence of Being and align with that.
One step at a time...

MM

~

Photo - Wave Vortex
Craypas oil with fingers
Mystic Meandering
Aug 2024

 

Endless Mystery - Rod MacIver

The deep, important journeys of life involve endless mystery.
The source of the cohesive disequilibrium of the universe  -
the disharmonies that combine to create harmony, the depths
of our inner worlds and the hidden belief systems and
mythologies, unique to each of us, that guide our lives
without us knowing it, the beauty of the natural world and the
search, individual to each of us, for the courage to manifest
the beauty within, to evolve, to change.  And the somewhat
contradictory search for inner peace.  We search for harmony
with our inner world, and sometimes find it, then, once again,
lose it.  And then of course the ultimate mystery of death and
the implications of that mystery on the true nature of life.
On living that life...

Rod MacIver

Heron Dance

 

"Downtime" - Rod MacIver

A crucial consideration in creating a [creative and authentic] life,
 is downtime.  By downtime I don't mean just time away from
the work.  I don't mean time to run errands or time to watch TV,
but time for reflection and solitude.  Time to let your mind
just wander to wherever it wants to go.  Time to absorb whatever
messages the larger universe might want to send.  Time to give
the messages deep inside your inner world an opportunity
to bubble up.

Without downtime [solitude], and it does require discipline and
planning, you lose touch with yourself.  You lose perspective on
the challenges of your life, and they start to take over.  You lose
access to your creative juice.  You may think that what you are
doing is dealing with pressing issues, and that those issues are so
important that you can't afford time away, but the message your
inner world will receive is that it is not valued.  It will then
retreat, and your [creative] work, your life, will lose power.

All the major setbacks in my life have come after a protracted
period of addressing pressing issues and not taking time off to
relax my mind and gain perspective.

Rod MacIver
Artist 
Heron Dance

~

Photo from the Internet

Happy July :)

Has anyone got an igloo I can use ?

LOLOLOLOL

 

An Inner Journey - Rod MacIver

A journal chronicles a journey
And the journey itself is home.

The journey in search of deeper awareness
The Source within
An inner journey that is not abandoned
Is its own triumph, its own work of art.

The journey itself is home.

~

There is an inner myth guiding each of our lives,
generally unknown to us.

Use your journal to explore that,
to explore the journey [the myth].

The value of journaling is the process of self-exploration
and self- nurturing [or self inquiry]

What is seeking to unfold in your life?

Ultimately the "goal" is to live in harmony
with your inner life [your Inner Being].

Rod MacIver

From: The Song Within

Heron Dance

~

Personal note:  I have been journaling as part of my
"journey" for over 40 years, as part of my "spiritual path",
a sort of "spiritual inquiry" and reflection...
For me “journaling” is not only about bringing mindfulness
 and awareness to my life, relationships, and spirituality,
but is a meditative practice to turn that awareness
 to the deeper space of inner Silence… 

MM

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Inner World - John O'Donohue

It is strange to be here.  The Mystery never leaves you alone.
Behind your image, below you words, above your thoughts, the
silence of another world waits.  A world lives within you.  No
one else can bring you news of this inner world.  Through our
voices, we bring out sound from the mountain beneath our
soul.  These sounds are words.  There are so many talking all
the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio,
in the paper, in books.  The noise of words keeps what we call
the world there for us.  We take each other's sounds and make
patterns and predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies.  Each
day, our tribe of language holds what we call the 'world' together.
Yet the uttering of the world reveals how each of us relentlessly
creates.  Everyone is an artist.  Each person brings out sound
out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.

Humans are new here.  Above us, the galaxies dance out toward
infinity. Under our feet is the ancient earth.  We are beautifully
molded from this clay.  Yet the smallest stone is millions of years
older than us. .....the silent universe seeks echo.

An unknown world aspires towards reflection.  Words are oblique
mirrors which hold your thought.  You gaze into these word mirrors
and catch glimpses of meaning, belonging shelter.  Behind their
bright surfaces is the dark and the silence.  Words are like the god
Janus, they face inwards and outwards at once.

If we become addicted to the external our interiority will haunt
us.  We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or
deed can still.  To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our
vulnerable complexity.  In order to keep our balance, we need
to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known 
and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together.
No one else can undertake this task for you.  You are the one
and only threshold of your inner world.  This wholesomeness
is holiness.  To be holy is natural; to befriend the worlds that
come to balance in you.

Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an
artist in this primal and inescapable sense.  Each one of us is
doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and
shapes a unique world.

Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a 
visible sign of invisible grace.

John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Vortex Art
Mystic Meandering

2011

 

Your Inner World - Rod MacIver

The Ocean within you is the universal reality or essence 
that dwells withing all beings...  Discovering this ocean is
vitally important for the discovery of balance because it 
provides a place of peace for you to return home to
despite all the chaos of the day.

Joel and Michelle Levy
Living in Balance

~

A friendship with your quiet interior allows you to better
understand the patterns of your life.  A special power comes
from diving deep into that world and accessing the wisdom it
contains.  It is a place of wisdom and peace, but our relationship
with it requires nurturing.

Your inner world guides you without you knowing it.  Our
thought patterns determine the quality of our lives.  The question
is, how can we gain access to the potentials of "knowledge" [knowing]
contained in the depth of us, how can we achieve increased capacities
of direct intuition [experience] and enlarged awareness...

A life journey, a creative journey, grows out of the seed of one.s song.

How would you describe the current of energy, the life force inside
you...?  Our most important relationship is our relationship with our
 self, with our interior world.  What do you do to nurture that
 relationship?  How you nurture that relationship will determine the
 quality of your life.

Rod MacIver
Heron Dance

~

What we call fate does not come to us from outside; it goes forth
from within us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

With thanks to Heron Dance

~

Photo from the Internet