When Things Fall Apart - Pema Khandro Rinpoche

There are times like these in our lives - such as facing death
or even giving birth - when we are no longer able to manage
our outer image, no longer able to suspend ourselves in
pursuit of the ideal self.  It's just how it is....  and in these
times of crisis we just don't have the energy to hold it all
together.  When things fall apart, we can only be as we are.
Pretense and striving fall away, and life becomes starkly
simple.

The value of such moments is this:  we are shown that the
game can be given up and that when it is, the emptiness
that we feared, emptiness of the void, is not what is there.
What is there is the bare fact of being.  Simple presence 
remains - breathing in and out, waking up and going to 
sleep.  The inevitability of the circumstances at hand is
compelling enough that for the moment, our complexity
ceases.  Our compulsive manufacturing of contrived 
existence stops.  Perhaps in that ungrounded space, we
are not even comforting ourselves, not even telling
ourselves everything is okay; we may be too tired to
do even that.

It's just capitulation - we're forced into non-grasping of
inherent reality.  The contrived self has been emptied
out along with contrived existence and the tiring
treadmill of image maintenance that goes along with it.
What remains is a new moment spontaneously meeting us,
again and again.

There is an incredible reality that opens up to us in 
those gaps...

Pema Khandro Rinpoche

excerpts from Breaking Open in the Bardo

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Way It Is - William Stafford

Mostly you look back and say, 'Well, OK.  Things might have

been different, sure, and it's not too bad, but look - things
happen like that, and you did what you could.'  You go back
and pick up the pieces.  There's tomorrow.  There's that long
bend in the river on the way home.  Fluffy bursts of milkweed
are floating through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where
trees reach out from their deep dark roots.

Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows till they learn
that floating, that immensity of waiting to receive whatever
arrives with trust.  Maybe somebody has to explore what
happens when one of us wanders over near the edge and falls
for awhile.  Maybe it was your turn.

William Stafford

original title "Afterwards"
from The Way It Is

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Everything Falls Away...

Everything is falling away.
Systems and internal conceptual structures
are fracturing; all around you - disintegration.
Only a shadow of what they were...

You cannot mend this -
People believe what they want to believe,
think what they want to think.

Hold fast...
Hold fast - do not be moved.
Lean into the intensity and hold fast.

Be brave - the storm is yet to come...

Mystic Meandering

_/\_

I found this written on some scratch paper
while decluttering on 7/28
Have no idea when it was written, but seems
appropriate to what we are facing now,
in this realm of existence...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

In Difficult Times - Matt Licata

Collect pieces of the broken world and create a container
of empathy and love for what has crumbled to be held
and tended to with pieces of light.  Honor the holy truth
that the forms that love takes will always fall apart -
for this is their nature -
in order that they may come back together in more
integrated and cohesive ways.

Matt Licata, PhD

~

Photo - a square from a quilt that my
great-grandmother made in the early
1900's from pieces of old neckties...