Window Wonderments...

My Medicine is the Quiet and Stillness of the Night
at the window...

I hear crickets tonight and and smell wet grass.
I see all kinds of light from the neighborhood
and the big office buildings' lights on the horizon.
I feel the coolness of the night air...
I take a deep breath and begin to unwind...

Suddenly I hear the sound of a helicopter overhead...

Oh! - and I can see the moon!  When I lean way into
the screen and look East...

Partially hidden by clouds and tree leaves.
I try to take a picture, but the screen gets in the way...
So I just sit, head up against the screen,
watching the moon hiding in the wisps of clouds
passing by...

~

The Night is my Friend.
The Quiet, The Peace, The Stillness
The distant lights of worker bee buildings
and the warm glow of "home lights" in the
windows of the houses nearby...

The distant sound of late night traffic
that does not disturb;
the stately trees, silhouetted, motionless in
the Stillness with a single cricket chirping.

And the moon...

~

I look down from my second story perch.
I see that I must sweep the pea gravel in the
Zen Garden walkway below;
trampled by tree cutters dragging tree limbs;
Roofers and painters walking through,
carrying long ladders -
paying no attention to where they step,
or to the pavers that make the walking path -
trampling stone and gravel.

~

Watching the moon reminds me that we are
part of a larger Universe, a grand Cosmos - with
a bigger "story" - an expansive context - in which we live.
It fills me with wonderment at how the Universe works;
what "intelligence" created it all to make it work the way it
does, like clockwork.  Everything in its own function,
working together.  And why the earth is so crazy with
its human species creating chaos, suffering, and struggling...

~

I enjoy this "window time."

What I'm really trying to do sitting here,
late at night at the window, is to connect
with Source, The Silence of Existence;
to energetically *feel* it...

~

12:28 am -
Time to slip into sleep...
I shuffle the body to the bed
and lay down...

Peaceful having
communed with the Night...

Mystic Meandering
Aug 24, 2024

from notes written at the window :)

~

Photo - Moon hiding in the clouds
taken from the window
through the screen :)

 

A Deeper Rhythm...

I've heard a deeper Rhythm....
Composed of cello, viola and oboe, I think.
I heard it when I was in the kitchen
cooking dinner one night,
many years ago,
and every other night after that,

for several weeks,
until it stopped...
when the noise of my life
became too loud - again,
and the weight of my weary heart
drowned it out -
like now...

There was no music playing on the stereo,
just the sound of the meal cooking,
and the sounds of daily living
outside the window:
children playing,
dogs barking,
lawn mowers,
power saws,
and birds -

chirping...

Underneath it all was a Rhythm
so melodious I could even hum it;
forgotten now...

I just listened, and hummed, with wonder...
Where was this coming from -
this music -
this slow, deep melodic rhythm,
drawing me into itself...

I didn't even have to try to listen,
it was just there
soft - in the distance,
barely audible,
as if in another room,
through another door,
maybe even in another realm;
a cosmic rhythm

I knew then, somehow, that my own life rhythm
was hidden in this Deeper Rhythm...

But I no longer hear it now;
drowned out by the
noise of living
other people's
rhythms -
and the endless
cacophony
of daily
existence.

But I know it is there -
playing somewhere.
I listen for it -
this Deeper Rhythm,
that underlies
all other rhythms...
mysteriously playing
within...

Mystic Meandering
Nov. 5, 2015

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

"Lanterns of Light"...

Sinking deeper into the calming comfort
of the rich darkness of the universe within;
floating into the depths of the inner Cosmos,
"lanterns of light" appear suspended in the dark:
stars - at the interior frontiers of beginnings,
before time, before relative reality, before "I" began,
in the space of Pure Silence...

Where the unmanifest spirals ItSelf into form;
into galaxies of molten stardust
rotating ever so slowly through the universe;
that also somehow became "me"!
For no reason - except
the pure pleasure of Being,
the pure pleasure of existing.

This fantasia of Existence,
fancied and composed of
stardust and galaxies of liquid light
dancing through the universe
inhabits this body...

Light and matter
vibrating together, in resonance,
like a tuning fork - enlivening this body,
all bodies, everywhere.

A symphony of Wonderment...

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 27, 2017

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Peaceful Window...

I am surrounded by Beauty -
the Beauty of nature - just outside my window.
So peaceful, so quiet...  I marvel in wonderment;
in contrast with the chaos inside the window...

I breathe in the Beauty through my eyes - and relax -
knowing that ultimately everything is at peace
within itself - including myself - within and without -
and breathe a sigh of relief -

as the Beauty of Grace shows up once again...

Mystic Meandering
Nov. 3, 2022

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Hidden Within...

"She" - The Primordial Energy of Life
is "hidden" within...

"She" - The Primordial One,
Sometimes conceals "Herself",
Sometimes reveals "Herself"
through you, through all of us;
as we are all expressions of "Herself"
in disguise;
however named:
"The Mystery"
"The Divine"
"Essence"
Shakti
God

Through this mystery we find
our way to Who we are -
by simply Being - ourselves -
the Natural expression of ourselves...

We recognize at the core of our Being
that we are "Her" - that Primordial Energy
disguised in a body, playing ourself...

Wonder of wonders...

Mystic Meandering
March 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Choice - Jeff Foster

Friend, please, do not try to decide now.  Do not shut
any possibility out of your heart.  Honour this place
of not-knowing.  Bow before this bubbly  mess of
creativity.  Slow down. Breathe. Sink into wonderment.
Befriend the very place where you stand.  Any decision
will make itself, in time.  Any choice will happen when 
your defences are down.  Answers will appear only
when they are ready.  When the questions have been
fully honoured and loved.  Do not label this place
indecision.  It is more alive than that.  It is a place
where possibilities grow.  It is a place where uncertainty
is sacred.  There is courage in staying close.  There is
strength in not knowing.

Friend, please know there is simply no choice now.
Except to breathe, and breathe again, and
trust this Intelligence beyond mind.

Jeff Foster

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Child of the Milky Way - Chet Raymo

I am a child of the Milky Way.  I am made of the dust of stars.
Every atom in my body was forged in a star.  When the
Universe exploded into being, already a bird longed for
the wood, and the fish for the pond.  When the first galaxies
fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling
toward consciousness.

The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush.  If there is
a voice in Sagittarius, I'd be a fool not to listen. If night's faint
lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I'll sit back on a dark
hillside and wait and watch.  Waiting, always waiting,
for the tingle in the spine.

Chet Raymo
from: Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

~

Photo from the Internet

~

How does one explain the mystery of the Inexplicable?
I can only embrace it... My "medicine" - my wild comfort -
is the wonderment and splendor of the Infinite Cosmos
of which we are a part - suspended in the Milky Way.

It soothes my Soul.

MM

_/\_

 

A Mysterious Engagement - Terence McKenna

Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past.  Do not lose yourself
in the castles of the future and do not give your authenticity
away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses,
wives, mates - take back your mind and body and begin to
engage with the fact that you are alive, you are going to die.
Nobody knows what being alive is and nobody knows what
dying is.  You're involved in a mysterious engagement where
every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity,
and wonder.  There is no mundane dimension, really.  If you
have the eyes to see it, it's all transcendental. 

Terence McKenna

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo by Cate Kerr
Beyond the Fields We Know

 

Deepening Wonder - Jeff Foster

I do not believe in anything.
I have no religion.
I have no god, including the gods of money, science, and atheism.
I have no fixed theories about reality, including that one.
I see heaven and hell, karma, reincarnation and the search for
enlightenment as beautiful fairy tales.
I have no guru, no lineage, no teacher, and so everything
 teaches me.
I see doubt and profound mystery as my most trusted companions.
I walk no path except the one appearing directly in front of me.
I have no home except this sacred moment.
I trust nothing at all, except whatever happens.
I find no meaning in life except the fearless living of it.
I know that today could be my final day.
I feel grateful for all that was given and all that was taken away.
I see the inherent limitation of language and yet love to play
with it.
I see the joke in using the words "I", "me" and "mine" and yet
delight in using them.
I realise that I am not my story, and realise even that ins't true.
I find it impossible to say anything about myself, for experience
is constantly changing.
I find it effortless to talk about myself, for who I Am never changes.
I know that on the deepest level I am profoundly equal to you.
I know that these sentences are pale imitations of truth.
I do not believe in anything.
I have no religion.
Except the in-and-out breaths.
And endlessly deepening wonder.

Jeff Foster

with thanks to No Mind's Land
and photo too.

 

Wrapped in Wonderment - Miriam Louisa Simons

no longer working to get free

(or fix or heal or please)

no longer needing to understand

how any of this is possible

not to mention

knowable

I rest

entirely wrapped

in wonderment

Miriam Louisa Simons

Echoes from Emptiness

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Guru - Fred LaMotte

A teacher fills you.
A guru empties you.
A teacher gives knowledge.
A guru awakens
the knower.

One transmits information.
The other transmits wonder
without words.
Your mind thirsts
for certainty.
Your heart years for
breaking open.

If the yearning is intense enough,
the guru could be a cricket.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

[Or - an Iris with a hidden face :)]

Photo from Uradiance

 

Under the Words - Eckhart Tolle

Underneath the surface appearances, everything is not only
connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all
life out of which it came.  Even a stone, and more easily a flower
or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to
yourself.  When you look at it or hold it and let it be without
imposing a word or mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder,
arises within you.  Its essence silently communicates itself to you
and reflects your own essence back to you.  This is what great
artists sense and succeed in conveying in their art.  Van Gogh
didn't say: "That's just an old chair."  He looked, and looked,
and looked.  He sensed the Being-ness of the chair.  Then he sat
in front of the canvas and took up the brush.

When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a
sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long
time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became 
possessed by thought.  A depth returns to your life.  Things
regain their newness, their freshness.  And the greatest miracle
is the experiencing of your Essential Self as prior to any words,
thoughts, mental labels, and images.  For this to happen, you
need to disentangle your sense of I, of Being-ness, from all
the things it has become entangled with, or identified with...

The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things,
people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality
becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the 
miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you.
In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and
so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness.  They are concealed in
the still gap between the perception and the interpretation.  Of
course we have to use words and thoughts.  They have their own
beauty - but do we need to become imprisoned by them?

You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly
believing that when you have attached a word to something, you
know what it is.  The fact is: You don't know what it is.  You have
only covered up the mystery with a label.  Everything has
unfathomable depth.  But all we can perceive, experience,
think about, is the surface layer of reality.

Do you think that combinations of words could ever explain
who you are, or the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even
what a tree or stone is in its depth?

Eckhart Tolle
From - A New Earth

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Struck - Richard Wehrman

The leaves, turned for some
time, of the maple, the oak, lit by
the afternoon light, shattered the air,
the eye, in color alight like no
other, only their own with the sky
behind, crystalline and pale blue, the
air stripped of otherness, only the
instantaneous transmission of
luminous ether, from interstellar
to earthly receptor; one was
struck dumb, dropped to the knees
felt by Saints upon stones,
hands folded, eyes lifted upward
as angels descend, yet the only
action was to be struck stone still,
movement arrested, unbelievableness
standing present in the everyday,
there, with the everything else -
cars moving down the street,
people walking this way and that,
geese heading west before they
turned south; so the procession
proceeded, the unnoticed noted by
few, you could hardly say it
mattered, another Fall day - yet it
fell, it landed, as unlikely as
any fiery chariot out of the sky, the
ordinary unveiled; bliss beheld in
one simple moment's blessing.

Richard Wehrman

From - Being Here

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
The photo with my old i-5phone
 just doesn't do justice to this flaming wonder
against the moonlit sky tonight... 

 

The Art of "selving" - Fred LaMotte

I offer a new verb: 'to selve.'

It means to finally be You.  To be what you love, and love
what needs doing, and dot it as no one else can.

No guru teaches you to selve, just as no parent taught you to
walk.  To selve, you must abandon the notion that the universe
expects you to act in accordance with somebody else's rules.
Selvers follow no role model or mythic archetype.  They 
abandon the words "as" and "like."

You cannot selve "as" anyone who came before you: neither
Sakyamuni, nor Mohammad, nor the Guru, or Jesus.  In fact,
the great way-showers all selved.  Then they taught, "If you
want to know God, you too must selve.  But you cannot selve
as me.  You must selve as you."

Only in the present moment can you selve, and only in a state
of wonder.  When you do something beautiful and say, "I have
no idea how this happened!  I didn't do it!" you have selved.

Selvers do not seek the "Self."  If the verb of selving ever came
to rest in the noun of Self, you would be dead.  Selving is energy.
Self is an abstraction.  You are not here to attain a state of being:
you are here to be.

Selve a chef, a carpenter, a yoga teacher, a janitor, a warrior,
a nurse, or an investment banker. In the art of selving, there is
no superior or inferior status, no better or worse.  There is but
authenticity.

No one selves cruelty.  No one selves dishonesty.  No one selves
selfishness.  Those are malfunctions...  When you truly selve,
you only love.

As for Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Guru: these are just names we
give to people who have selved with wild abandonment.  Every
moment they lived, they were bewildered by themselves.

Fred LaMotte
Urandiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Natural State - U G Krishnamurti

 The natural state is not the state of a self-realized God-realized 
man. It is not a thing to be achieved or attained, it is not a thing
to be willed into existence; it is there - it is the living state.
This state is just the functional activity of life.  By 'life' I do not
mean something abstract; it is the life of the senses, functioning
naturally without the interference of thought.

This state is a state of not knowing; you really don't know what
you are looking at.  I may look at the clock on the wall for half
an hour - still I do not read the time.  I don't know it is a clock.
All there is inside is wonderment.  The whole of my being is
like a single, big question mark.  It is a state of wonder, of
wondering, because I just do not know...  The knowledge of it -
all I have learned - is held in the background...

You can never understand the tremendous peace that is always
there within you, that is your natural state.  Your trying to
create a peaceful state of mind is in fact creating disturbance
within you.  You can only talk of peace, create a state of mind
and say to yourself that you are very peaceful - but that is not
peace.  So there is no use in practicing peace, there is no reason
to practice silence.  Real silence is not a dead state of mind that
spiritual seekers think. Silence is bubbling all the time - the 
energy, the life - that is its quality.  You may ask how I know.
I don't know.  Life is aware of itself, if we can put it that way -
it is conscious of itself...

UG Krishnamurti

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Our  Luminous Essence
is,just waiting to be discovered...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Pull Out Your Wonders - Nick Penna

When you listen you reach
into dark corners and
pull out your wonders.
When you listen your
ideas come in and out
like they are waiting in line.
Your ears don't always listen.
It can be your brain, your
fingers, your toes.
You can listen anywhere.
Your mind might not want to go.
If you can listen you can find
answers to questions you didn't know.
If you have listened, truly listened,
you don't find yourself alone.

Nick Penna - fifth grade !!!!

From: Poetic Medicine by John Fox

With Thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

What are your gifts - "wonders" - to the world that you could
pull out despite the weariness of existence that we
are experiencing these days with the COVID
hanging around - like a lurker in our lives?

 

Inner Passageways - Matt Licata

 The path of opening the heart is not the same as becoming
 an unboundaried, leaky vessel for the unloading of another's
unlived life.  It is to the degree that we are attuned to our
own grief, sadness, shame, and rage that we will most
skillfully navigate within the we-space...

Most of us were not trained in the art of embodied

attunement as we live in an increasingly disembodied
world, where the capacity to hold unfolding emotional
experience was not encoded into a tender developing
nervous system.

The inner passageways, however, are luminous and ache
 for reorganization by way of the slower circuitries of
empathy, curiosity, wonder and awe. 

Inside something is stirring, a longing being awakened to
return home, for new circuitry to encode, for a new pathway

to light up and come alive.

Slowly, one moment at a time.
Safe. Connected. Open.

Embodied.

There is no urgency on the path of love.

Matt Licata

~

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

Existence Beyond Words - Bynner

Existence is beyond the power of words
 to define: Terms may be used
But are none of them absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth
there were no words.

Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or Passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.

If name be needed, wonder names them both;
From wonder to wonder
Existence opens.

From - The Way of Life
According to Lao Tzu

(translation of the Tao Te Ching)
by Witter Bynner

~

Solstice day is the peak of time,
a high pause in the year, when
we taste and see the majesty of
light solidified [in Nature].

The Formless sparkles in form...

For at the core of our soul is an
inward eye that cane see [the light]
hidden behind the ordinary...

Fred LaMotte

~

Photo taken by my brother :)

Wonder and Awe - Stephen Jenkinson

photo from unsplash.com

It's dark.  You are standing in a field...  This the midnight sky
of your younger, wilder days.  It is ablaze, aching with stars.
It is the vault of heaven, indigo sea of time pierced by light
from the other side.  The horizons are gone, and the Bridge of
Sighs, the one they say the dead walk to leave this world,
dazzles you.  Dew settles on your shoulders and you're
atremble, no longer full with comprehension and certainties.
Every idea you have seems too small for the world.  You
lived long enough to see a night such as this, you're stilled by
it.  There are unlikely companions in the field with you,
everyone quiet.  Someone looks up into the night sky and says:
"You see that star right there?  Could be it isn't there anymore."
Some things in life are too hard to see by yourself because they
happen every day, unwinding above your busyness, or because
you thought you knew them already.

Wonder takes a willingness to be uncertain, to be thrown.  We
have a lot of information these days, and few are enamored of
imprecision or subtlety.  But starlight traveling a bewildering
distance for so long that there is every chance that it doesn't
even exist anymore, and all of that having already happened,
and you standing there, your face blazed in the dark by a
starlight gone, seeing it all, what is and what isn't there: that
is a marvel, and surely that is how awe is born...

Stephen Jenkinson
From - Die Wise