Solace...

What remains...
When all surface identities,
all beliefs and facades of truth have
proven to be untrue,
and the mental constructs begin to fail...
is a more authentic, softened, innocent perspective;
a simplified view of reality...

One begins to feel more,
viscerally,
the finer, subtler vibration
of the Ineffable;
which was here long before we were born...

There is no need to remember...

The mind and body may fail in their functions,
may still contract
around old thought and feeling impulses
of the brain...
But trust that the Ineffable in you
Remembers Its Origins...

So Rest...

Let the mind float...

Be still, aware...

Keep feeling...
Keep listening inwardly,
for the Music,
The Divine Rhythm,
the pulse of the Universe

playing subtly,
the original Rhythm of your pre-conceived life...

Find solace in the Rhythm
that plays you;

the Breath within the breath
that breathes you;
the Rhythm of
That which is
eternally Present in you;
That to which you have
devoted your
Heart...

Mystic Meandering
April 22, 2016

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Wildest Comfort - Kathleen Dean Moore

 I don't know what despair is, if it's something or nothing, a kind
of filling up or an emptying out.  I don't know what sorrow does
to the world, what it adds or takes away.  What I think I do
know now is that sorrow is part of the Earth's great cycles,
flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course.
To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the Earth, the surge from
living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist.
Maybe this is why the Earth has the power over time to wash
sorrow into a deeper pool....  And maybe this is why, even though
 sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the
 currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of
wonder and solace...

...I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from,
this splitting open of the self.  It takes me by surprise.
Not an answer of beauty and mystery, but beauty and
mystery themselves, flooding into a mind suddenly
without boundaries.  Can this be gladness, to be lifted
by that flood?

...The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery
of transformation, one thing into another.

This is the wildest comfort.

Kathleen Dean Moore
Excerpts from - Wild Comfort - The Solace of Nature

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Solace of Silence - Cheryl Sanders-Sardello

The enormity of life's tasks weigh and press on the day...
they demand and insist on a constancy of attention that is relentless.
But we are fortunate to have night's solace - in the silence that is
created by the dark.  Night... that melancholy time, when the stars
remind us of the Silence of God.  Here we can lean into the
unknown, setting aside the oppressive weight of our carefully
constructed version of who we think we are.  We can remember
how to see in the dark... with our ears... perceiving the Silence in
its holy echoing and resonance, its calling forth a knowing that is
from the soul.

The Silence sends us on a different pilgrimage.  It guards the heart's
fire and teaches us to speak from within with a language that is
imbued with the Sacred.  Words thus nurtured in the Holy Silence
fly forth to lead us back to the Silence from which they were born.

Cheryl Sanders-Sardello
From - Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness
by Robert Sardello

~

Several years ago I "practiced" what I called "window sitting."
I would sit in the window in the dark late at night when the "noise"
of the day had settled.  It was an incredible experience - just
listening to the silence of the night, leaning into the darkness, the
silence at the window, which drew me into the
deeper Silence of Being - the Sacred Silence within, as Cheryl describes.
I have gotten away from this "practice" of "listening" at the window
 to the Silence, but am rediscovering my way back...

~

What is necessary, after all, is only this; solitude, vast inner solitude.
To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours...

Rainer Maria Rilke

~

Photo - clouds, color inverted digitally

Melted - Mary McGovern

Something just melted in the story of me.

Like a warm balm, the softness spread

over muscles and bone and fascia.

Whispering - "It's okay, it's okay..."

The mantle of knowing slipping

off shoulders, the sweet relief

of no judgment, no opinion, no idea.

What is good or wrong?

I cannot say, not even for "me."

And this is the deep solace of emptiness.

Full of tender sigh, deep breath,

grateful tear.

I cannot know.

 I cannot know. 

And gratitude explodes silently again...

Mary Mc Govern

Grace Is Now

Serenity's Sanctuary - Nature

The Common Land

The common land – the land that belongs to Nature -

spreads out before me straw brown and velveteen,

carpeting the earth, plush and soft.

The colossal cottonwoods line the edges of the

common land and fill out the in-between spaces.

Like skeletal silhouettes, they reach up into the

cloud whisked sky, embracing the late afternoon sun.

The pond lies frozen at the distant end of the common land

like an opaque mirror unable to reflect.

Yet – adds its frosted image to the lullaby of the landscape.

There’s something comforting about the common land

in Winter that draws my soul and captures my spirit;

a soothing presence that plays its own mystical rhythm

around and through me.

The land in its dormancy provides solace;

allows me to hear the Stillness that surrounds me.

In this deep connection everything else loses its importance,

its priority, its urgency.

Perspective returns like a long lost, yet familiar friend,

and my spirit is released…

Nature ~ Sweet Serenity

Christine Kennedy

January 1999