Missed Moment - a meandering...

I stepped outside one morning in May recently
to put cracker crumbs under the bird feeder,
for the birds, squirrels or whatever would eat them.

Upon stepping out the door,
I immediately felt the cool morning breeze
on my face...

I stopped in my tracks,
lifted my face to the breeze in silence,

and was stunned by the aliveness of the greenery
of everything, through the dappled light of
the morning sun;
like a blind person seeing for the first time...

Everything went still - for about 5 seconds.
I didn't take it in, didn't linger longer to feel
the moment, but stepped out of the moment to
finish my task and went back inside to continue
my care-giver routine.

I had missed an opportunity, and I knew it,
to be in the quietness of Nature, my backyard
version of Nature, with its beautiful trees,
gentle breezes. and filtered sunlight;
recently seen only through windows - until this
one moment.  I had just one moment - and I 
missed it.

I realized how much I have missed the quiet connection
with Nature over the past couple of years, not even
going out into my backyard; a prisoner in my own home,
missing the quietness of Nature, the comfort of Nature.

I actually miss quietness in my life! BC
Before Caregiving- the role I took on nearly 20 months ago.
So many losses of quiet moments and personal freedoms
over that time.

That's a story I need to explore...

So what does *this* story that I tell myself
 about feeling imprisoned,
and missing moments
 trying to tell me...

That I need to find and savor quiet alone moments
like these - and stay there - allowing myself to connect
with a much needed deeper Quiet within...

Mystic Meandering

May 2024

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
watching for the mailman :)

 

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

 

Trust Your Solitude - Rainer Rilke

.....in the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your
beautiful anxiety about life...  Here, where I am surrounded by
an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they
come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere
who can answer for you those questions and feelings which,
in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most
articulate people are unable to help, since what words point
to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable.  But even so, I
think that you will not have to remain without a solution if
you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small
Things; if you have this love for what is humble, then everything
will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more
reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays
behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness,
awakeness, and knowledge.

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked
rooms or books written in a very foreign language.  Don't
search for the answers, which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is,
to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps then,
someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even
noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in
the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you
will find all your paths...

Rainer Maria Rilke
Excerpt from: Letters to a Young Poet #1

The Refuge Within - St. Teresa of Avila & Angeles Arrien

There is a secret place.
A radiant sanctuary.
As real as your own kitchen.
More real than that.
Worlds within worlds.
A clarity so complete you will
never again forget.

This magnificent refuge is inside you.
Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway.
Step around the poisonous vipers that slither
at your feet to throw you off course.
Be bold.  Be humble.
Put away the incense and forget
the incantations they taught you.
Ask no permission from the authorities.
Close your eyes and follow your breath
to the still place that leads to the
invisible path that leads you home.

St. Teresa of Avila
Mirabai Starr translation

~

I trust the mystery.  I trust what comes in silence
and what comes in nature where there's no diversion.
I think the lack of stimulation allows us to hear and
experience a deeper river that's constant, still, vibrant,
and real.  And the process of deep listening mobilizes
exactly what's needed at that time.

Angeles Arrien

With thanks to Michel
at No Mind's Land

Listen to Trees - Hermann Hesse

Trees are sanctuaries.  Whoever knows how to speak to them,
whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.
They do no preach learning and precepts, they preach
undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

[.....]

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer,
then a tree has something to say to us: Be still!  Be still!  Look
at me!  Life is not easy, life is not difficult.  These are childish
thoughts.... Home is neither here no there.  Home is within you,
or home is nowhere at all.

If one listens to them silently for a long time, it reveals its kernel,
its meaning.  It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's
suffering, though it may seem to be so.  It is a longing for home....,
for new metaphors for life.  It leads home.  Every path leads
homeward, every step is birth, every step is death...

When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and
the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve
an incomparable joy.  Whoever has learned to listen to trees no
longer wants to be a tree.  He wants to be nothing except what he is.
That is home.  That is happiness.

Hermann Hesse
Trees: Reflections and Poems

via: Love Is A Place

The Temple of the Prairie...

Wanted to share this beautiful scenery from the prairie we visited yesterday, just after a storm passed through.  There was nothing but Pure Quiet, as if one had entered a sacred temple...  The air was pungent with sage and sweet grass - Nature's Incense! :) - delighting the senses, igniting the spirit of Life within.  The words under the photos are the words of Kabir.  Many of us know the "secret sound" that he refers to as the Primordial Silence within...  At the end I have added a quote from a person named Christina Harris that I found years ago...

If you want the truth...

Listen to the secret sound,

the real sound,

which is inside you...

The music from the strings
no one touches...

~ ~ ~

What remains is the child I was...
All other images once living here
have stepped away.
With each leave taking
the view is simplified.

Christina Harris

Sabbatical...

Deeply hidden within is a longed for “sabbatical life.”

Tired of "the journey", I am in need of respite - Primordial Rest.

– but life, it seems, has its demands...

  Still, I try to carve out some semblance of “sabbatical living” daily –

 despite the roller coaster ride of distractions and preoccupations;
 the daily requirements of life, health, family and relationship -
bowing to the inevitable and the Ineffable -
submitting to both...

  Spending time in Meditative Silence
is an infrequent refuge lately...

  But even in that Stillness I bobble on the surface of life,

 challenged by an aging body, the crises that others create,

 navigating the maze of family dynamics –
whirling havoc in my mind...

But a Deeper Rhythm calls from within...

"Sabbatical"

The Primordial Rhythm of Rest

"Sabbatical" is a very deep and vital need – like breathing -
 and requires Silence and Solitude,

like the Holy Quiet of a Natural Sanctuary;
  a lily pond found in the deep woods...
where only the Ineffable moves,
and converses in an
unspeakable language
that only Silence can hear...

I linger here - drawn into the depths of Silence
until I'm ready to move again
into life's currents,
  facing into the present realities of living,
 – and just live -

Listening...

 for the Deeper Rhythm within...
The Inner Sabbatical;
not its outward form.

 Opening to the hush of The Mystery
 revealing Itself through the every-day-ness of living...

Just Living...

Mystic Meandering
April 14, 2016

On the Threshold of Winter...

Well actually I think we’ve crossed it.

Winter arrived this morning in all its beauty...

At least 6-8 inches of snow covered everything.

The leaves still on the trees twittered in the wind.

Evidences of an invisible hand leaving its signature behind…

~

Excerpt from: Eternal Echoes
by John O’Donohue

“Within and around us there is an invisible [Formless] world; this is where each of us comes from.  Your relationship to the invisible influences so much of your life.  When you cross over from the invisible into the physical world, you bring with you a sense of belonging to the invisible that you can never lose or cancel.  Under the guise of emptiness, the invisible keeps its secrets to itself.  Yet the invisible remains the great background.  There is always some magnet that draws your eyes to [It] or invites you to explore behind things and seek out the concealed depths.  Your longing for the invisible is never stilled.  You know that the real nature of things is hidden deep within them.  When you enter the world, you come to live on the threshold between the visible and the invisible.  You are both artist and pilgrim of the threshold…”

Back To The Garden...

"And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden..."

lyric from "Woodstock"

I took a little trip “back to the garden” last week to relieve my myopic view of life, to feel a little spaciousness and gain clearer perspective; to “slow down to the pace of my soul”/spirit/Being. (A phrase coined by Ruth at Washed Stones).  I hadn’t been back to the Garden since May - a public garden, like a botanical garden…  This time it was a delightful damp Fall day.  We haven’t had many of those here this Summer/Fall.  I thrive in the damp coolness of wet earth, subdued skies, and the quiet aloneness with Nature under a still lush canopy of trees that have not yet displayed their colors.   I wandered, through this partially man-made “forest”, meandered down different roads, and paths, listening to silent Intuition lead, waiting for the Voice to speak, to draw my attention to what it wanted me to see - following It’s path…   This is what Intuition found…  Enjoy the view!

Coming around a bend, down a slight hill, I came upon a gaggle of women delighting over Dahlias, which for some reason moved me to tears, internally, to see such joy and excitement being expressed in adults, who were just as excited as children discovering something for the first time!  They spontaneously let their inner spirit come out to play.  Something I needed to do as well, after being bogged down in the bogs of the mind.  I had actually never seen Dahlias before. They *were* wondrously, magically HUGE, as if from Alice’s Wonderland – and their multiplicity of color I had never seen in flowers before!  Only got this one picture though, because the gaggling women were hovering over each long stemmed bloom with a camera, and I had to wait my turn, trying to be obscure– slipping in and slipping away – so as not to intrude… J

Moving on I came across the Pumpkin Patch, as if abandoned to some forlorn landscape away from the Garden… They were HUGE pumpkins – obviously well fed and watered…  I wondered, what do pumpkins think, Charlie Brown… Can they hear the trees talking across the path…  Are they *aware*…  Ah, here it comes, the playful spirit. There was a break in the mental fog…

Intuition led me away to the serenity, silence and stillness of the Lily ponds.  Those big round pads that look like large pizza pies fascinated me (photo below), how they effortlessly just sat on top of the water – tethered somewhere deep beneath the surface, waiting for who knows what – just open and waiting, in silence…  receptive…  Which is what I was trying to be in that moment – listening, awareing with my whole Being…

I passed by this sculpture nestled amongst the evergreens that reminded me of two monks bowing in deep regard for each other, a deep acknowledgment for the *Life* in each other.  Even the statues exuded a certain silent reverence, held in the embrace of the Spruce, and sung to by the whispers of the Pines…

I continued on the winding trails, taking in the smell of the dampness of earth and dying leaves – the smell of change and transition; hearing the gravelly sound as my feet walked on minute crushed rock.  Letting go of mental obsessions, I noticed the sound of rushing water, and followed…  It took me into an enclave of bushes and trees with benches and a lovely little cascade of water over rocks.  Pure, clear fluidity…  The water cascades over the rocks to the right. Wish I had remembered to turn the video on instead…  But you get the idea…  Maybe next time… Gives me a reason to go back, to let my spirit out to play again…

There now, doesn’t that feel better J 

Walk Slowly

“It only takes a reminder to breathe,
a moment to be still, and just like that,
something in me settles, softens, makes
space for imperfection.  The harsh voice
of judgment drops to a whisper and I
remember again that life isn’t a relay
race; that we will all cross the finish
line; that waking up to life is what we
are born for.  As many times as I
forget, catch myself charging forward
without even knowing where I’m going,
that many times I can make the choice
to stop, to breathe, and be, and walk
slowly into the mystery.”

DannaFaulds
From: Go In and In