This Moment in Time - Jorie Graham

What I tell my students, when they feel singularly unfortunate to
be born in this moment, is this is your moment, the moment your
soul showed up incarnate.  In this world.  It is an astonishing moment
to be alive.  You could have been born into a lull - instead you were
born into a tipping point. It's your one life and you've entered it at
a flexion point - a point when everything you do matters.  How
often in history does a soul get to live in such an era?  Don't waste it.
Show up for it.  With everything you've got.  Some will invent,
some will organize, some will witness, some will grieve, some
will console.  Live this life now.  Even if in fury and grief, live it.

You don't want to die not having lived.  It's incredibly easy to find
a way around experience rather than through it.  But you will have
cheated yourself out of ..... your life.  You are
here now.  Now is the time to live fully, not hide, not escape.

Jorie Graham

With thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Birth/Death - Krasznahorkai

[...] he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous
moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with
amazement as he understood this; he would feel... - gently he
grasped the copper handle of the door - the warmth of the
mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover 
the hidden depths of human existence. would finally understand
that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world are not
imprisoning chains.....  ; and he would discover the enormous
joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything;
rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of
fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his
anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast
required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship
of his certain future, and, then -- he started opening the door -
he would finally know that our every moment is passed in
a procession across dawns and day's-ends of the orbiting
earth, across successive waves of winter and summer,
threading the planets and the stars.

Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there
blinking in the half-light.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Hungarian Novelist and Screenwritet
From:  The Melancholy of Resistance

with thanks to Love is a Place

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Ceaselessly Being Written - Wendell Berry

We arrive here in this world having forgotten where we came from,
though something of a memory seems to remain: a whisper, a
distant shine like that of a house window at night on the far side
of the valley, perhaps what some have called "the inner light," to
guide us when finally we have been jolted awake.  And so we 
don't come from nothing.  But once here we don't know where we
are.  At first I learned the world as a book written, completed the
day before my birth, not to be changed by another pen stroke. 
And then I saw that some I know were departing from it, never
to return, and new strangers were arriving.  The newcomers, if
they stayed, would learn more of less of where they were.  And
then, in time, they too would depart, taking with them the sum
of all they had learned, leaving behind them maybe a few who
would remember them, and then the rememberers too would go 
and be gone.  I see in this order of things, nothing to complain
about.  I have been here long enough to watch the whole turn of 
the wheel.  I see that we are passing through this world like a
river of water flowing through a river of earth.  A far cry from a
written book, the world - to extend my desperate metaphor - is
a book ceaselessly being written, and not in a human language.
This too has not been submitted to our judgment, and it is not
for us to regret.  To give thanks seems truly to be the right
response, for as we come and go we learn something of love,
the gift and the giving of it, if we accept it...

That is the heart speaking in the heart's language, and out of
a mystery so vast that order and chance may be reconciled
within it.  Because, for all we surely know, we come into our
times and places as much at random as leaves falling...

Wendell Berry

from How it Went - Thirteen more stories of
the Port William membership

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo -Mystic Meandering

 

Death and Rebirth - Matt Licata

In each moment the sacred process of death and rebirth
is playing out within us.  With each breath something
in us is dying - some aspect of who we think we are -
or the spiritual path that once brought us meaning...

In the face of this dissolution, the question isn't so 
much how we can most quickly facilitate rebirth, but
to what degree we will participate [consciously] in the
death when it appears.  Psychological death, or
spiritual death, is not just a preliminary process in
which we engage so that we can put it behind us and
get on to birth.  It is a valid, holy unfolding with its
own intelligence...  [It is] a catalyst, and vessel of
insight, perspective, and revelation...

It is natural to resist this falling apart and do what we
can to put it all back together.  But it is only from the
womb of death - attuned consciously - that rebirth can
emerge.

Allow the death time to unfold, to share its poetry and
fragrance...   Death is not merely a phase to get through.
In those periods in our lives, when things are being
rearranged and reorganized inside and around us, we
can attune to what is truly being asked of us...  Listen
to the wisdom in death and what it has to teach us about
love...  We allow the dissolution so that new forms can
emerge and provide the transformation for which we
most deeply long.

Matt Licata
from - A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Traveling Toward Life - Richard Wehrman

He was surprised
to see the gray clouds,
for the sunrise was clear
with blue sky, and he
assumed, as he always had,
that the sky moved
as the sun moved, east
to west, yet here the clouds
came. traveling west to
east, and he thought of
the trajectory he imagined
his life took, of birth
to death, infancy to old age,
and he wondered if he
had missed something,
if the winds moved
differently than he supposed,
if death also traveled
toward life, if there were,
more currents than he
could imagine, and if
imagining itself, setting
a distinct course, one he
planned in advance, kept
him from seeing; if he
were at this moment
actually growing younger,
at the same time he grew
older; if he was in fact
moving in ways he could
barely sense, into another
life, into other worlds.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here
Original title: "Traveling"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Births - Pablo Neruda

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient
about our being,
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,
and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
Nor do we even keep
the memory of being born,
although to come into being was tumultuous and new;
and now you don't remember a single detail
and haven't kept even a trace
of your first light.

It's well known that we are born.

It's well known that in the room
or in the wood
or in the shelter in the fisherman's quarter
or in the rustling cane fields
there is quite unusual silence,
a grave and wooden moment as
 a woman prepares to give birth.

It's well known that we were all born.

But of that abrupt translation
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and weeping and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition, that quivering
of an electric presence, raising up
one body more, like a living cup,
and of that woman left empty,
the mother who is left there in her blood
and her lacerated fullness,
and its end and its beginning, and disorder
tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers
till everything comes together and adds
one knot more to the thread of life,
nothing, nothing remains in your memory
of the savage sea which summoned up a wave
and plucked a shrouded apple from the tree.

The only thing you remember is your life.

Pablo Neruda
from Plenos Poderes (Fully Empowered)

Art by Jackie Traverse

With thanks to The Beauty We Love
and photo too...

 

The End Game...

Accumulated shadows
from a life lived
emerge into the present -
like forgotten orphans...

The melancholy mind
grieving its losses:
names, places and events
become vague histories;
even the present moment
is a blur - already passed.

She recognizes what's coming,
as the shadowy figures move over
her chess board of life,
playing the end games
until checkmate...

grieving her once lived life
in the game...

Mystic Meandering
May 21, 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

A Time of "Dying"...

 Photo - David Peters

A time of "dying",

dying to the entanglements of this world;
to the demands of this world;
dis-mantling the attachments;
untangling the knots...

A time of "dying".
to self-image;
the loss of the structure of identity;
of expectations of how I hoped life would be,
how I would be -
Yet grateful for the way it is...

A metaphorical "death",
an internal "death";
the death of perceptions,
perspectives, beliefs and preoccupations -
only shadowy characters in the play.

Feeling the loss of my own "death" already,
my self-made identity - loosening its grip;
the decline in faculties of mind and body -
losing their functions...

Something in us knows
when we hear the haunting echo of birds
singing at dawn - "waking" you up -
that something inside is "dying"...

Yet, I welcome this "death",
this "release";
the release of physical tension,
the mind's mentations,
and the ache of the heart.

And possibly an opening
into a Great Transition;
a Rebirth into
the Rhythm of
the Grand Mystery
of the Universe...

Mystic Meandering
April 23, 2021

Doors through which we pass - Thich Nhat Hanh

 This body is not me.
"I" am not limited by this body.
"I" am life without boundaries.
"I" have never been born,
and I have never died.

Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars,
manifestations from my wondrous true mind.

Since before time, I have been free.
Birth and death are only doors through which we pass,
sacred thresholds on our journey.
Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek.

So laugh with me,

hold my hand,
let us say good-bye,
say good-bye,
to meet again soon.

We meet today.
We will meet again tomorrow.
We will meet at the source...
We meet each other in all forms of life.

Thich Nhat Hanh

via - Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

A Preponderance of Ponderings on Impermanence - Krishnamurti

 We have to understand another phenomenon in life, which is
 death: death from old age, or disease, and accidental death,
through disease, or naturally.  We grow old inevitably, and
that age is shown in the way we have lived our life, it shows
in our face...

So there is old age.  And there is this extraordinary thing called
death, of which most of us are dreadfully frightened.  If we are
not frightened, we have rationalized this phenomenon intellectually
and have accepted the edicts of the intellect.  But it is still there.
And obviously there is the ending of the organism, the body.
And we accept that naturally, because we see everything dying.

But what we do not accept is the psychological ending of the"me",
with family, with the house, with success, the things I have done,
and the things I have still to do, the fulfillments and the frustrations 
- and there is something more to do before I end!  And the
psychological entity, we're afraid that will come to an end -
the "me", the "I", the "soul", in various forms, words, that we give
to the center of our being.

Does it come to an end?  Does it have continuity?  The East 
has said it has a continuity: there is reincarnation, being born
better in the next life if you have lived rightly.  If you believe in
reincarnation, as the whole of Asia does, then in that idea is
implied, if you observe it very closely, that what you do now,
every day, matters tremendously.  Because in the next life you're
going to pay for it or be rewarded depending on how you have
lived.  So what matters is not what you believe will happen in
the next life, but what you are and how you live.  And that is
implied also when you talk about resurrection. Here (in the West)
you have symbolized it in one person and worship that person,
because you yourself don't know how to be reborn again in your
life now.

So what matters is how you live now - not what your beliefs are...
But we are also afraid that the center, called the "I", may come
to an end.  We ask:  Does it come to an end?

You have lived in thought; that is, you have given tremendous
importance to thinking.  But thinking is old; thinking is never new;
thinking is the continuation of memory.  If you have lived there,
obviously there is some kind of continuity.  And it is a continuity
that is over, finished.  It is something old; only that which ends
can have something new.  So dying is very important to understand;
to die; to die to everything that one knows. [believes]. 

  You know, one has collected so much, not only books, houses,
bank account, but inwardly. the memories of insults, the memories
of flattery, the memories of neurotic achievements, the memory of
holding onto your own particular experience, which gives you a
position.  To die to all that without argument, without discussion,
without any fear, just to give it up.  Do it psychologically - of course
we don't actually give up our wife/husband, our clothes, our children,
or our house, but inwardly, don't be attached to anything.  Love is
not attachment.  Where there is attachment, there is fear.  And fear
inevitably becomes authoritarian, possessive, oppressive, dominating.

But to die to everything within oneself! [attachments, ideas, concepts,
beliefs].  This  means that the mind, which is not of thought - the mind
becomes utterly quiet, silent, naturally, without any force, without
any discipline.  And in light of that silence all actions can take place,
the daily living, from that silence.  And if one were lucky enough to
have gone that far, then in that silence there is quite a different
movement, which is not of time, which is not of words, which is not
measurable by thought, because it is always new. It never dies.

J Krishnamurti
from talks in Europe 1968
Amsterdam
May 19, 1968

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Ethereal Window

Briefly Here - Jim Wilson

Briefly
We walk this earth.
We have
But a short time.
We resemble grasses;
Green in the spring,
Brown in the summer heart,
Withering in the winter wind.
Those who understand this
Put aside their useless quarrels.
The cosmos is unfathomably vast.
The human mind is very small.
An act of kindness is never wasted;
it is the gateway to the deathless and unborn,
it is the exultation of the heart.

Jim Wilson

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

Photo via No Mind's Land

Cosmic Stirrings - Author Unknown

The Cosmic skies are stirring, there is a change in the air
that may awaken us to some new truths.

How beautiful that we don't yet know the way.
How beautiful that there are elements of life
that still confuse us, make us feel deeper than
we could have imagined, and remind us of
what is real and pure in our hearts.

How beautiful, that even though we don't yet
know "the way", we can spread our wings,
shift our awareness, and trust that there is a
new unfolding that is destined to come.

It is the journey of metamorphosis that we
are being guided to walk down.

Whatever comes, know that it is part of how we
move through our own cycle of ego into the
dark night of the soul, and then finally, into
spiritual wisdom.

Sometimes we need intensity to drive the
vehicle of transformation.

While we want to remain strong and centered,
we also don't want to limit or cut ourselves off
from allowing whatever comes to move us,
change us, and transform us.

We have to remember to keep shifting our
awareness of what life is and what role we are
here to play; to allow ourselves to keep dying
and being reborn.  Keep questioning, keep growing,
keep allowing things to shock and surprise us, for
they are often the fuel for our continued growth.

author unknown
found on Facebook

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
water droplets on a white background
color inverted and zoom blurred :)

Birthing... - Stephen Levine

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
from: Breaking the Drought, Visions of Grace

~

Photo - Beautiful Mammatus clouds at sunset
taken by my husband a couple of nights ago.

The Guest - Kabir

The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure [despair] goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no-one has shaken,

inside "love" there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through with in all parts by a
single sort of love.

How hard it is to feel that joy in all our bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word "reason" you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs [poems] are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out. [birth and death].

Kabir

from: Ecstatic Poems

Thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

The following is part of a commentary on the above poem
that I found this morning on line.  Author Unknown...

~

God is already in you; the True God, not the man made
image of God, not god of the temples, and the churches,
and the synagogues and the mosques and the gurudwaras...

The god that man has imagined in his own image, the god
that man made according to his own wishes, the god that is
nothing but the projection of man's mind and desires...
  That god never really existed.[because "God" is much
vaster than our personal limited images of who/what
 "God"is.]
The untrue [image] MUST cease for the truth to be.

Those who know the True God, know God as the fragrance
of life, the perfume of existence, the very ground of being.
For them God is not a concept, not a theory, not a hypothesis.
For them God is an existential experience.  For them God
is not separate from man, for them God is man's innermost
core...  God is nothing but your own depth [your Core Being]
trying to manifest itself.  God is not an ideal.
God exists as you - as life.

Life is eternal.
Life is immortal.
It changes forms, just like the waves in the ocean go on changing
but the ocean remains.  Bodies come and go, but your innermost
[Being] remains always there.  And that is God.

God is not to be worshiped, but realized.  There is no need to make
temples for God.  You have to learn to look within.
The temple is already there; It cannot be destroyed.

God is always your interiority...

The Guest is within you, but you have to turn in...
You have to become more conscious of your Consciousness.
You have to become more aware of your Awareness.
A point of stillness comes where you are simply aware of
your [inner] Awareness...

When Awareness [the Core Being] is the only content of your
awareness, that is the moment when The Guest is found...

author unknown