You Be You - Brian Swimme

Each era in the Universe is unique,
never to be repeated.  It's as if at dawn a deep
resonant voice calls forth to every entity in
existence:  "Become your unique self."
The Universe advances only if you 
blossom forth as you!

At birth each of us is given a quantum of
energy.  The Universe offers us a gift and
asks only one thing in return:
That we use it to say who we are.
When we live a life that expresses our unique
being, we align ourselves with the Universe.

Brian Swimme
Cosmogenesis

~

Photo - Aurora Borealis by John Hyde

 

Life Blooms Through You - Ilchi Lee

 Observe your body.  It breathes.  You breathe
when you are asleep, when you are no longer
conscious of your own ideas of self-identity.
Who, then, is breathing?  The collection of
information that you mistakenly think is you is
not the protagonist in this drama called the
breath.  In fact, you are not breathing; breath
is naturally happening...  You can purposely
end your own life, but you cannot purposely
keep your own life going.  The expression,
'my life' is actually an oxymoron, a result of
mistaken assumption.  You don't posses life;
Life expresses itself through you.  Your body
is a flower that Life let bloom, a phenomenon
created by Life.

Ilchi Lee

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
The Many Faces in the Blossoms

Can you see some of the little faces?! :)))

Sing Your Song - Progoff/Sinetar

A creative journey grows out of the seed of
one's song.  We need that song from you,
the song that only you can sing.

Ira Progoff

~

.....power comes from harmony with [our] inner
world...  The relationship is nurtured in silence, in
solitude, in reflection...

People who overcome great difficulties have a trusted,
trusting relationship with themselves...  They are aware
of the inner core of themselves that is always there,
that never dies...

Marsha Sinetar

With thanks to Heron Dance

 

The Song From Within - Robert Henri

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day,
when we see beyond the usual - become clairvoyant.  We reach
then into reality.  Such are the moments of our greatest happiness.
Such are the moments of our greatest vision.  At such times, there
is a song to which we listen.  It fills us with surprise.  We marvel
at it.  We would continue to hear it. But few are capable of holding
themselves in the state of listening to their song.  Intellectuality
steps in, and as the song within us is of the utmost sensitiveness,
it retires in the presence of the cold, material intellect.  It is
aristocratic and will not associate itself with the commonplace -
and we fall back into our ordinary selves.  Yet we live in the
memory of these songs, which in moments of intellectual 
inadvertence have been possible to us.  They are the pinnacles
of our experience and it is the desire to express these intimate
sensations, this song from within, which motivates the 
masters of all art.

Robert Henri
artist and writer in the 1800s
from his book The Art Spirit

from: HeronDance.org

Here's to the song from within.  That shy song that retreats
from the commonplace.  The song needs downtime, space,
in order to emerge.  It walks the slower, gentle path.

What does yours have to say, to sing?  Like a little flame,
easy to extinguish, needing nurturing, needing recognition.
In harmony with that song, I am alive, powerful, happy, at
peace.  I live in wonder if I make room for that song.

But it is shy, disappears at the slightest discontinuity.  Few
are capable of holding themselves in that state of listening.
I'm often not.  But it is, nevertheless, worthy.

Rod MacIver
artist and writer

from Rod's new Heron Dance website and e-journal.

During these times we all need inspiration and to
find our creative expression.  All you creatives, 
artists and writers might enjoy his inspirational
e-journal and reading about his "journey."

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Free to BE - Fred LaMotte

The first discipline of non-violence is to honor every human
being as a unique soul-body, refusing to identify them by
race, gender, religion, or political party.

Yet just as much as right-wing movements, today's "progressive"
movement often promotes conflict and division by labeling
individual Persons by their group identity.  Some of us who
talk about "diversity" actually stifle it, because real diversity
is not to promote tribalism [or nationalism], but to recognize
the incomparable [unique] Personhood of individuals.
[As it also says in the Declaration of Independence.]

It is much easier to hate a category than a Person, whether
your animosity is toward Muslims or Christians, "black people",
or "white people", liberals or conservatives.

The beginning of world peace is to free each human soul-body
from racial, political, or religious abstractions.  Our incidental
association with a group is not who we really are.

I do not identify my Self [Eternal Being] as a color, as rich
or poor, capitalist or socialist, Republican or Democrat,
Christian or Pagan [or American].  I am neither "good" nor
"evil."  Those are just conceptual chains with which your mind
attempts to enthrall me.  But I am not your concept of me:
you are.

If you want to superimpose a group identity on me, that is your
act of violence against the singularity of my Personhood.  You
are free to label me, but I am also free...  I refuse to identify with
your label...

I Am who I Am...

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance
(from a 2018 post)

[brackets mine]

Photo from Stillness Speaks

~

This is a newspaper clipping from 1968 that I still have.
The same year that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy
were assassinated...

~

We are truly Free when we recognize our Eternal Beingness
in each other, and, the diverseness of our individuality
that expresses that Beingness, and treat each other with
respect and compassion...

Creative Entitlement - Elizabeth Gilbert

Creativity is the relationship between a human being and
the mysteries of inspiration...

You have treasures hidden within you... extraordinary treasures.
Bringing those treasures to light takes work and faith and focus
and courage...  and the clock is ticking, and the world is
spinning and we simply do not have time anymore to think small.

We are all capable of brushing up against a sense of mystery and
inspiration.  We may be able to draw nearer to that source than
we think, being gently propelled by some force.  Something
carries us along, something not "me."

"Creative Living" is living a life that is driven more strongly
by curiosity than by fear.

You will never be able to create if you don't believe that you
are entitled to at least try.  "Creative Entitlement" doesn't mean
behaving like a princess, or acting as though the world owes
you anything.  Creative entitlement simply means believing
 that you are *allowed* to be here, and that merely by being
 here you are allowed to have a voice, and a vision of your own. 

The poet David Whyte calls the sense of creative entitlement
"the arrogance of belonging" and claims it is an absolutely vital
privilege to cultivate if you wish to interact more vividly with life.
Without it, you will never push yourself out of the suffocating
insulation of personal safety and into the frontiers of the beautiful
and the unexpected.

"The arrogance of belonging" is not about egotism or self-absorption.
In a strange way it's the opposite.  It is a divine force that will
actually take you out of yourself and allow you to engage
 more fully with life.  It's not abut saying "I am the greatest", but
 merely saying "I am here" - to simply allow yourself to exist
 and express yourself. [to allow your Core Beingness
to express through you...]

Your soul will mobilize accordingly.  It will mobilize ecstatically,
because this is what your soul was born for.  Your soul [your
Core Beingness] has been waiting for you to wake up to your
 own existence [your innate Aliveness] for years.

Do whatever brings you to life.  Follow your own fascinations...
Trust them.  Create whatever causes a revolution in your Heart.

Inspiration is trying to send you messages in every form it can.
Through dreams, through portents, through clues, through
coincidences, through deja vu, through kismet, through inspiring
waves of attraction and reaction, through the chills that run up
your arms, through the hair that stand on the back of your neck,
through the pleasure of something new and surprising.  Through
stubborn ideas that keep you awake all night long - whatever works.

The work wants to be made, [whatever 'the work' is for you] and it
wants to be made through you.  [You Core Being wants to express
ItSelf through you in creative ways.]

Elizabeth Gilbert

From: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

[brackets mine]

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
photo of leaves on grass in the Fall, color digitally inverted.

Magic! :)

Authentically You - V. Erickson, Nepo & MM

Often times, a person will think they know you by piecing
together tiny facts and arranging those pieces into a puzzle
that makes sense to them.  If we don't know ourselves
very well, we'll mistakenly believe them, and drift toward
where they tell us to swim, only to drown in our own
confusion.

Here's the truth: It's important to take the necessary steps
to find out who You are [our True Beingness] because
you hold endless depths below the surface of a few facts
and pieces and past decisions.  You aren't only the ripples
that others can see.  You are made of the Ocean...

Victoria Erickson
Author of - Edge of Wonder

~

What it really comes down to is the clearness of heart
to stop defining who you are by those who have hurt you
and to take up the risk to love:
to live at the vibrant edge
of being spirit in the world
exploring the intoxicating quandaries
of being alive,
accepting the grace of our
humanness...

Mark Nepo
From - The Exquisite Risk:
Daring to Live an Authentic Life

~

It's about being enlivened from within;
being fiercely true to the core of our Being:
Compassion, Love and Pure Aliveness...

Open to how That wants to express ItSelf -
allowing the Dynamic Mystery that we are
to express ItSelf from deep within...
Not needing to take a stand on anything,
but finely attuned to the Heart of Love -
discovering a deeper Wisdom...

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
Sept 2016

~

Art - Craypas Oils
done with fingers

2012

Carving out a "Path"...

Life is asking me to redefine "the path" - again - to deepen
into a "new" way of seeing, being and living.  I am
embarking on what feels like a new step into the unknown,
carving out a "path" for myself, opening to new directions,
new perspectives, new awareness.  Being open to what is
really living this Life called "me" - and - at the same time,
allowing myself to just be the way I am.  As Ramana Maharshi
said to those who were searching for the Truth of their being -
"Be as you are..."  In letting go of the need to look through a
particular "spiritual" lens, I realize how freeing it is to allow
myself to just be myself...  To not strive to know the Truth,
but to let it reveal ItSelf; to not strive to be "spiritual" or
"non-dual" - or "enlightened."  I can just be who I am  -
as that is who my true "Beingness" IS.  I don't have to be
self-conscious about using words like "I", "me", "my" - in
some kind of pseudo non-dual awareness - because...  It's all
just Beingness, pure Awareness, pure Consciousness, Source,
God, etc., expressing ItSelf.  There's no need to make a
distinction between self and Self.  It's all The Self...
Imagine that :)

I don't need to worry about whether I'm coming from the ego-
self because it's part of the whole package, part of the
wholeness that we are.  I only need to BE, and let
BEingness reveal ItSelf, express ItSelf, live Itself as "me."

It's not about "me" being "enlightened", or spiritualizing
everything, but seeing the True Nature of myself and
being authentic...

I continue to gradually shed the conceptual frameworks that
have defined and informed my "path" so far - the boxes of belief
that have tended to constrain this authentic expression of Self,
extricating my sense of self from the life dramas that have
preoccupied my mind.  This shift in consciousness may take
some time, and I don't know where I will land, realizing that
Life is truly a Sacred Adventure of just Being, and adventure
in lightness and boldness; of letting go of the sack of
insignificant items/beliefs that I've been carrying for so long...
It's a never-ending exploration...

Namaste
Mystic Meandering

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

True Identity - Seth Balthazar

True Identity cannot be lost.
No matter how many masks you wear
the unique face underneath cannot be lost.

It cannot be lost, but it can be forgotten.
The "I" cannot be lost, but it can be blinded.
To find it again is only to remember that which
you already knew.
It is the remembrance of your true identity.

The search is for one's true identity.
For who you ultimately are,
and what is your essential source.
To know through and through the Essence
of your being.

And to live that, to express that in the world.

Seth Balthazar
Philosopher and Poet
Excerpt from - "True Identity"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Shadows of Bamboo leaves
against rainbow colors on a wall
forming a face/mask...

Perspective - Carse, Lin Chi, Kastrup & Bailey

How we perceive things, and therefore what we call
'real,' or 'true,' or 'right,' has to do with our perspective
from where we sit in the overall continuum.

The tendency is to absolutize one's own perspective,
to make everything relative to that, when in fact our
perspective is what is relative...

David Carse
Advaita
Perfect Brilliant Stillness

~

If you want to perceive and understand objectively, just don't
allow yourself to be confused by people.  Detach from whatever
you find inside or outside yourself - detach from religion, tradition,
and society, and only then will you attain liberation. When you're
not entangled in things, you pass through freely...

Lin Chi
Buddhist

~

All explanations are myths whose truth-value we assign
subjectively.  They are true only insofar as we say that they are
true.  They are stories we conjure up and tell ourselves in order
to make sense of the disconnected, context-free phantasmagoria of
present perception.  It makes no sense to proclaim any explanation
for the present to be objectively true...

Bernardo Kastrup
Philosopher
More Than Allegory

~

Stories about existence can't be fact.
What is your actual experience?
What has life been presenting all along?
Don't deny your day-to-day experience.

We are the dance of the universe.
All the story lines are a legitimate
expression of Existence...

The Formless is form...

Darryl Bailey

unaffiliated

~

Photo - shadow of the spindles in the back of a chair
on a wall...

Free to Be - Fred LaMotte

The first discipline of non-violence is to honor every human being
as a unique soul-body, refusing to identify them by race, gender,
religion, or political party.

Yet just as much as right-wing movements, today's "progressive"
movement often promote conflict and division by labeling individual
Persons by their group identity.  Some of us who talk about "diversity"
actually stifle it, because real diversity is not to promote tribalism
[or nationalism], but to recognize the incomparable [unique]
Personhood of individuals. [As it also says in the Declaration of
Independence].

It is much easier to hate a category than a Person, whether your
animosity is toward Muslims or Christians, "black people", or
"white people", liberals or conservatives.

The beginning of world peace is to free each human soul-body from
racial, political, or religious abstractions.  Our incidental association
with a group is not who we really are.

I do not identify my Self [True Inner Being] as a color, as rich or poor.
capitalist or socialist, Republican or Democrat, Christian or
Pagan, [or American].  I am neither "good"nor "evil."  Those are just
conceptual chains with which your mind attempts to enthrall me.  But
I am not your concept of me:
you are.

If you want to superimpose a group identity on me, that is your act
of violence against the singularity of my Personhood.  You are free to
label me, but I am also free...  I refuse to identify with your label...
I Am who I Am...

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

[brackets mine]

~

My note: It's an act of aggression when we impose prejudicial categories and labels on "others"; when we don't see that we are all a unique expression of our shared Core Beingness; when we've been enculturated to hate "other" people's cultures through fear because they are not like "us"...  We are all "free" when we recognize each other's Core Beingness as our own, and the diverseness of our individuality that expresses that Beingness and treat each other with respect and compassion.

And, oh btw, we are all immigrants here, unless you were born 100% Native American.  I am .2% Native American, but the rest of "me" comes from other countries, other cultures.  My English ancestors arrived here in the 1600-1700s and populated much of New England, and evidently somebody intermarried with a Native American.  My Irish and Scottish ancestors arrived probably in the 1800s and intermarried with the English ancestors, and my Norwegian ancestors arrived int he late 1800s, intermarrying with...  well you get the idea.  We are mongrels! :)  Essentially, however, we all share an Essential Beingness far beyond our ancestry, our humanness, far beyond personalities and character traits, beliefs, patriotism, opinions, DNA and intelligence.  And we are inherently Free to Be who and what we are!

And on another note:  My father was greeted by the Statue of Liberty coming back from Europe on a ship with thousands of other soldiers, (given to America by the French, btw), after serving in WWII at age 19-20 in Germany, being hit in the face with shrapnel from "enemy" mortar fire.  That was  his path, his journey, and that of his generation - to fight "the enemy" for an idealized freedom...  I don't think he (or that generation) understood things with the same "spiritual" lens that I do, but he did what he felt was right at the time, believing it was the right thing to do.  And I respect him for that, because his perceptions were different, although his war experience wounded him emotionally for life.  But he not only fought for America, he fought for the freedom of the Europeans in Northern Europe as well, and for the hope of freedom in the world... And yet we are still fighting!  Building walls instead of welcoming statues of liberty - because "we"/humanity (in general) lack the understanding of Who we all essentially are...

Namaste
_/\_

~

Photo -
via Stillness Speaks

Life is a Dynamic Expression - Darryl Bailey

Life is a moving, shifting, dancing event...
and we are part of that movement.
Life will play out the way it plays out,
it's all just happening.
Life is a dynamic function, doing what it does.
Just acknowledge the movement, the event;
the Flow of Life ItSelf...

Everything in existence is a legitimate expression of Existence.

We are the legitimate expression of Life, of Existence,
of this great mysterious happening.
just as we are...
Each different and unique in our expression.

When we see that, we can rest...

Acknowledge the wild, exotic expression that you are,
in your uniqueness.

Darryl Bailey

Excerpt from video talk:
Challenging the Fantasies

photo image via Stillness Speaks

~~

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when
one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life,
when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within
oneself?  If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes
truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding
and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such
paradox.  One must live in the middle of contradiction, because
if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing
questions.  You continue to live them out, making your life a
worthy expression of leaning into the light...

Barry Lopez
From: Arctic Dreams

via: Beyond the Fields We Know