Follow Your Own Map - Mark Nepo

Every time we talk to someone, there comes back to us a map
of expectation as to how we should respond...

We share a confusion:
we are often given direction.

We share a pain;
we are often given instruction.

We share a desire;
we are often given a plan.

The power of these unspoken maps should not be
underestimated.  For the endless gravities of expectation
we move in and out of govern most of our thinking and
summons most of our energy in denying them or complying
with them.  In actuality, underneath all the plans, pressures,
and expectations, underneath all the subtle guidance and nudging,
the next step is truly unknown...

Thus, our spiritual charge is to maintain the wonder of the
singular explorer that each of us is...

The freshest step has always come when we are brave 
enough to land at the end of what little we know,
breathing in new air, in reaction to no one...

Mark Nepo
From: The Book of Awakening

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
(Scrapbooking paper) 

 

The path of reality - Nathalie Delay

The path of reality is a non-path, because it is above all
an exploration of life int its wholeness... without falling
back on our models and our repetitive, comfortable
pat-terns.  It's a non-path.....because we recognize in
real time how we negotiate with reality, how we 
cling to a belief or to our need for control, and how this
outlook keeps us from being in tune with the moment 
and creates our suffering...

The path of reality does not require us to conform to any
model, because it is not attached to what we do, think or
feel.  It invites us to see how we behave with our opinions,
our emotions, and with living beings.

The path of reality is more than anything a path of self-
knowledge, not in the psychological sense but in the
most essential and profound sense there is.  It helps
us rediscover our absolute aspect while incorporating
the most human part of us. It brings us back to the
roots of our being, making a complete humanity
possible...

Nathalie Delay

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Confessions of a Wanderer - Fred LaMotte

The grail knights thought it a disgrace to quest in a group.
So each entered the forest where there was no path, and
where it was darkest.

La Queste del Saint Graal, 13th C.

Up until age seven, I wandered.  Then I began to buy the
propaganda of my school.  The teachers insisted that if
I wanted to grow up I had better get life all figured out, and
learn to be a success.  Of course, they were just passing along
to the next generation their own fear of failure.

Took me the next half century to realize that they were pretending.
Absolutely every adult I met was pretending to know.  Over the
years I too pretended, and played the role of knower.  So that I
could be a successful doer.

Now I know that I don't know.  And the more I don't know, I know
who I am.  And the more I do.  Because it is not the do-er who
does, but Being.

If you've found the true path, congratulations, please don't guide
me. If you've found the movement that will finally save
humanity, congratulations: please don't sign me up.  Because
what I have found is the courage to wander again.

I have abandoned the compass technique.  Now I enter the ancient
forest precisely where the trees are unfelled.  I have no desire to
super-impose my map of consolation over this unfathomably mystery.

.....The blossom of Correct Teaching withers away, we are the
fragrance that remains.  Just by admitting we know nothing, we
sigh together and breathe life.

Letting go of our search, we meet each other where we get lost, 
and arrive at our destination.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Full Moon July 2022

 

Sail Away - Fred LaMotte

No writing on your sail.
No affirmations, not even "I."
Just let it ripple
in the cool steady breeze,
this breath.

The sail itself is the name of the Goddess.
You can stop rowing now.
Let the current carry you.
Throw the map away, the chart
of nadis and chi lines,
chakras and postures.
Who knows where you're going?
Destinations don't matter anymore.
Just sailing is grace.
Merely breathing in this body
is adventure.
And the sparkling sun on living water?
The beauty that shines
from your heart.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance
and photo of art too...

Art: Leonid Afremov

 

Divine Discontent - a meandering...

Something is arising in me - calling to me through the veils
of "spirituality" - that cannot be ignored...  The Call of the
Soul - the Passion of the Soul...  The call to a deeper
authenticity...

It's as if my Being, my Soul, is trying to free Itself from its
confines and constraints - A Divine Discontent.  There's a
sense of needing to break out of those limiting constraints,
to break out of a "role", a "spiritual identity", a "spiritual"
self-image that has kept me dancing to a tune that I now feel
out of sync with - out of sync with my Soul; needing to
find my own unique rhythm with life.

"Spirituality" has, in ways that I don't fully understand,
 suffocated my authentic expression of "The Mystery." 
And now I need to emancipate myself and live that
unique expression.  I must discover my own way, and
navigate my unique path.  It cannot be prescribed by others;
conforming to someone else's maps of Reality, but 
emancipating the true expression of the Soul, whatever
that may look like; listening to the authentic Voice within.

As I write these words, I feel myself settling back into
myself again - my Natural self - not an abstract 
"spiritualized" Self - hiding behind the
veils of "spirituality."

So what is my Soul calling me to?
What is my "unique path" - my unique expression?
What is the Fire in my Soul?

They are yet to be discovered...

But there is a kind of Alchemical transformation
arising within...  I feel its Fire...

_/\_

Mystic Meandering

July 1, 2022

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

At the Edge - Czeslaw Milosz

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map leads him there.

Or perhaps memory.  Once long ago in the sun,
When snow first fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong without reason,
Joy of the eyes.  Everything was the rhythm

Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion.

He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

Czeslaw Milosz

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Swan and The Frog - Dennis Holtje

Photo by Robert Woeger on Unsplash

There once was a beautiful white swan that came from the great
ocean to the North.  After being in the South for the winter, it
was ready for the return journey home.  So it took off and with
its big wing span and shining white feathers, it soared effortlessly
through the blue sky.  After a long while, and far along the journey,
the swan began to tire and came down to land for a rest.  It landed
right on the edge of a water well and let out a deep sigh.

In the bottom of this well there lived a frog.  The frog said, "Well,
who are you and where do you come from?"

"I am a swan, and my home is on the water of the great northern
ocean," answered the swan.

"Ocean?  How big is this ocean? asked the frog.

"Very big," said Swan.

"Is it this big?" Frog asked, taking two hops backward.

"No, much bigger," said Swan.

So the frog took five huge hops backward, saying,
"Is the ocean this big?"

Swan said, "No, it's much bigger than that."

And so the frog went around the entire well - his whole
reality, as he knew it - and asked the swan, "Now, is the ocean
as big as this?"  And the swan said, "No, it's much bigger,
much bigger!"

Thereupon the frog said, "Well, you're a fool and a liar!"
because he knew there could be nothing bigger than
 his world and his well.

Dennis Holtje
From: Light to Sound

 

 

Cosmic Dream - John O'Donohue

In the beginning was the dream...
In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened. 
Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed...  Every single
thing is somehow the expression and incarnation of thought.

If we take Nature as the great artist of longing, then all presences
in the world have emerged from Her mind and imagination.  We
are children of the Earth's dreams.  It's almost as if Nature is in
dream and we are her children who have broken through the dawn
into time and place.  Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay, we
are always somehow haunted by that, we are unable ever finally
to decide what is dream and what is reality.  Each day we live in
what we call reality, yet life seems to resemble a dream.  We rush
through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to
stay and the serious project of the world depended on us.  We
worry and grow anxious - we magnify trivia until they become
important enough to control our lives.  Yet all the time, we have
forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of
a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos.

There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream.
What we consider real is often precariously dream-like.  And
even our grip on reality is tenuous...

John O'Donohue
From: Eternal Echoes

Photo from the Internet

 

What Are Your Beliefs? - Dave Gray

 Beliefs are not reality.  They are not facts.
They are constructions.  You construct your beliefs,
even though for most people this is an unconscious
process, and they hold you captive.  Your beliefs form
the fundamental model that you use to navigate the
world.

By beliefs I mean everything you know [or think you know].
All beliefs are approximations [of reality/truth]. because the
whole of reality is unknowable.  None of us can ever
completely understand.

A belief is something you hold in your mind, a kind of map
or model of external reality.  But just as maps and models
can be wrong, so can your beliefs.

When people confuse their beliefs with reality, they get
into [political and religious] arguments and conflicts, 
sometimes even wars.

We are all blind.  We may be able to grasp pieces of the truth,
but the whole truth about reality is unknowable [in the sense
of not being intellectually understandable by the mind].

Any understanding we can gain of the world will be limited
by our point of view.  We are each constrained by the boundaries
of our own experience [conditioning] - which form our beliefs.

Beliefs may seem like perfect representations of the world, but,
in fact, they are imperfect models for navigating a complex,
multidimensional, unknowable reality.

We create beliefs about reality to reduce its infinite complexity,
in order to make it easier to understand [or explain, or justify].

Dave Gray
Excerpts from: Liminal Thinking

[brackets mine]

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Survivors of Solitude - John O'Donohue

They are to be admired those survivors
of solitude who have gone with no maps
into the room without features,
where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,
no path of danger to a cold summit
to look back on and feel exuberant,
no clarity of territories yet untouched
that tremble near the human breath,
no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores
to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,
no friendship of other explorers
drawn into the dream of the unknown.

No.  They do not belong to the outside worship
of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior
space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,
where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human
and a poultice of silence pulls every sound
out of circulation down into the ground,
where in the panic of being, each breath unravels
an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind,
shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost...
...and the end of all exploring is the relentless
arrival at an ever novel nowhere.

John O'Donohue
From: Echoes of Memory

Original title - "Nowhere"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Wanting A Way & Nowhere To Go - Richard Wehrman

Not yet, the not knowing
says, now is not the time
to know, this is what I've
given - uncertainty -
as your mind tries to scale the glass
mountain, impenetrable;
not glass, but quartz, not
quartz, but diamond, clear,
all the way through, but no
way to get in or out, not by
looking for a door, for a key;
frozen in the this or that,
wanting a way - your way -
when ways, plans, paths,
maps and agendas, are
destinations past, continents
left behind, earlier stages of
evolution, your childhood,
your schoolyards, your old
ways of loving; what is coming
you can't know, it has no
existence, the formless has
nothing to offer, as something
arrayed in the future, only
this arriving now, gone as
you try to grab on, arriving
again and again, unknown,
brilliant and new.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

He was crossing an unknown
land, one he no longer knew,
though the landmarks were
identifiable and familiar; it was
the mystery of what stretched
before him, as the distance
lessened, as time in the outward
sense contracted, but inwardly
expanded and deepened, as
goals and achievements hour
by hour, day by day, lost their
imperative, and what he had once
set as a destination had been
passed with only slight remarking.
Now he had no where to go, and
the distance between somewhere
and nowhere was steadily
decreasing; in a similar manner
his excitement, his sense of
the immensity of some thing he
could not name grew, as though
that which he searched for
his whole life unknowing, and
which he called by many names,
which had been refracted by
art, music, certain writings...
by men of gravity and honor,
drew near, but was none of these.
And he felt the thrill,
and it hummed in the air.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

~

Photo taken by my husband
 on a hike many years ago :)

No Greater Temple - Matt Licata

At times the visitor of melancholy will appear,
arriving from the night world, from the moon,
[the feeling world], not to harm, but to reveal.
A tenderness, a disappointment, a raw achy
uncertainty.  The guide has appeared but wasn't
quite what we thought.  Such is the way of the
heart.  As we are made into dust, the fire is tended.

While it may be tempting to replace the burning
with bliss, the sadhana of disappointment demands
that we listen, to the stories and feelings and whispers,
and longings, and place the shattered pieces on the
altar in front of us.

Even if we cannot love, accept, or transform what has
come, we can always bow.  What this bowing looks
like for each of us will never conform to other's
fantasies and ways; for the map is weaved deep into
our soul alone.

We can fall to the ground and bear empathic witness to
the broken wholeness, to the wisdom shining out of
the human heart, for there is no greater temple.

Matt Licata

The Inside Door - Jan Richardson

You have looked
at so many doors
with longing,
wondering if your life
lay on the other side.

For today,
choose the door
that opens to the inside.

Travel the most ancient way
of all:
the path that leads you
to the center
of your life.

No map
but the one
you make yourself.

No provision
but what you already carry
and the grace that comes
to those who walk
the pilgrim's way.

Speak this blessing
as you set out
and watch how
your rhythm slows,
the cadence of the road
drawing you into the pace
that is your own.

Eat when hungry.
Rest when tired.
Listen to your dreaming.
Welcome detours
as doors deepen in.

Pray for protection.
Ask for guidance.
Offer gladness
for the gifts that come,
and then
let them go.

Do not expect
to return
by the same road.
Home is always
by another way,
and you will know it
not by the light
that waits for you

but by the star
that blazes inside you,
telling you
where you are
is holy
and you are welcome
here.

Jan Richardson

https://janrichardson.com/

via - No Mind's Land

The End of All Exploring - John O'Donohue

They are to be admired, those survivors
of solitude, who have gone with no maps
into rooms without features,
where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,
no path of danger to a cold summit
to look back on and feel exuberant,
no clarity of territories yet untouched
that tremble near the human breath,
no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores
to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,
no friendship of other explorers
drawn into the dream of the unknown.

No.  They do not belong to the outside worship
of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior
space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,
where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human
and a poultice of silence pulls every sound
out of circulation down into the ground,
where, in the panic of being, each breath unravels
an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind;
shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost,
where only the red scream of the blood continues unheard
without anonymous skin, and the end of all exploring
is the relentless arrival at an ever novel nowhere...

John O'Donohue

From - Echoes of Memory
Original title of poem: Nowhere

~

Photo - looking into the inside of a basket,
as if into an empty room.

Honoring The Mystery - Mark Nepo

Somehow we have been dropped into the Mystery,
below our roles, and identities, fallen through our maps into
one stream of love.  Some moment or circumstance becomes
an unexpected doorway into the Mystery.  We never know how
it will appear, or how we will be drawn to it...

Honoring the Mystery is what opens us to the powers of wholeness -
this unknowable totality that we live in.  To honor the Mystery is
not just to glimpse the whole, or even acknowledge the whole, but
to live our days with [as] that wholeness...  Commit to leaning into
life until it drops you beneath your surface maps of reality...

Though we pray to the many faces of God, each is a changing
wave in the sea of Divine Being...  Any circumstance that
awakens us to that divine sea is a holy gift...

If courageous enough we might just slow down to the pace
of creation, where the pulse by which the mind thinks touches
the pulse by which the heart feels, and together they equal the
rhythm where Being plays in exact motion with all beings...

Nothing matters but emptying...

until the softness we call Spirit bubbles through the tongue
and words fail in utter adoration.
Nothing now but the need to be...

Mark Nepo
From: The Exquisite Risk

~

Photo - Water on Windshield through a car wash :)

Follow Your Own Footsteps - Mark Nepo

Every time we talk to someone, there comes back to us a map
 of expectation as to how we should respond...

We share a confusion:
we are often given direction.

We share a pain;
we are often given instruction.

We share a desire;
we are often given a plan.

The power of these unspoken maps should not be underestimated.
For the endless gravities of expectation we move in and out of
govern most of our thinking and summons most of our energy
in denying them or complying with them.

In actuality, underneath all the plans, pressures, and expectations,
underneath all the subtle guidance and nudging, the next step
is truly unknown...

Thus, our spiritual charge is to maintain the wonder of the
singular explorer that each of us is...

The freshest step has always come when we are brave
enough to land at the end of what little we know,
breathing in new air, in reaction to no one, in wonder at
what is...

Mark Nepo

From: The Book of Awakening

(Mark's words, my format)

Losing the Maps - Mark Nepo & Kastrup

Just when we're softened by the years,.
when we have enough experience to see
for ourselves, our maps are torn from us.
This can be frightening, but there's divine
timing in the dissolution of a stubborn mind,
the way an inlet waits on the last rock to crumble
so it can find its destiny to the sea.  Losing the
way set out by others is necessary so we can discover
for ourselves what it means to be alive.  Now we can
burn the clothes others have laid out for us, [other's
maps of reality, other's agendas], not in anger, but
to light our way.  Now we can let the soul spill its
honey on the unleavened life we've been carrying.
Now we can rise.

Mark Nepo

Poem from: Inside the Miracle

[brackets mine]

~

All explanations are myths whose truth-value we
assign subjectively.  They are true only in so far
as we say 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...

Bernard Kastrup
More Than Allegory
via - Markings

Nothing is Just One Way - Joan Tollifson

...No words or concepts can capture reality.  Maps are useful,
but they can only describe and point to the territory itself.
Eating the meal is what nourishes you, not reading the menu.
Take what resonates and leave the rest...  Don't believe
anything you read, but instead, question, look, listen, feel
deep into, and see for yourself.  The book that wakes you
up one day may lull you to sleep the next.  Always be ready
to see something new and unexpected.

...stay open to the possibilities, to seeing things in a new way,
to questioning assumptions and conclusions.  ...this living
reality is no way in particular.  It is ever-changing, evolving,
dancing, vibrating, unfolding...  It never resolves into some
final package, some ultimate formulation.  There is no
finish-line on this pathless path, no definitive model or map
that captures reality.  What all true pointers are pointing to
is the living reality, and the living reality is ALIVE - fluid,
spacious, open, ungraspable.  It is not frozen or solid or
only one way.  It can't be pinned down.

Sometimes everything opens up when we hear a teacher say
that there is nothing to do.  Sometimes we need to hear
there is no choice, and sometimes we need to hear that
there is a choice.

Nothing is just one way...

Joan Tollifson

Our Concept of "Reality" - Bohm, LeShan & Brunton

Reality is what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is what we believe.
What we believe is based upon our perceptions.
What we perceive depends upon what we look for.
What we look for depends upon what we think.
What we think depends upon what we perceive.
What we perceive determines what we believe.
What we believe determines what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is our reality.

David Bohm
Quantum Physicist

~

The trouble is we have a basic commitment to the *idea*
that there is one true, valid concept of reality
(ours, of course) and that all others are primitive,
childlike, mythological or pathological.
[or false].

Lawrence LeShan
Psychologist
From: Landscapes of the Mind:
The Faces of Reality

~

There is no single path to enlightenment.
Life itself is the great enlightener.
Do not submit to the pressure of those who say
there is only a single way.....the way they follow
or teach.  Do not let the mind be trammelled or
narrowed.  The truth is that the ways are many,
are spread out in all directions, and are individual.

Paul Brunton
Mystical Philosopher

Illuminating the Way - Matt Licata

...there is something illuminating the way, but just what this is
cannot often be apprehended by ordinary means.
There is no external map here that you can rely on, only the
one that is written inside you.  While at times we sense the
presence of this inner guidance, it often comes by hidden
and symbolic means.  We must learn to listen for it in a
non-ordinary manner, not  just with our ears but with the
wisdom of the body, with the cells of the heart.

The mysteries of separation and union are already wired
into you... We are invited to meet them, in an inclusive embrace
of life -  the wholeness that we already are...

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Sunlight through a thinning cutting board...