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 :)

 

Waking - Richard Wehrman

He woke again, as he always
did, out of nothing into
something; the wind woke too,
barely there, a dry exhale of
breath over the leaves,
over the dry grass, and he noted
how complete he felt, in this
almost not hereness, only the
edge of awareness, the quality
that noted, that attended to,
and beyond that nothing else
at all, though it was coming back,
the body's sense of being...

...and the single
sounds that arrived before
sight, for he had not yet opened
his eyes -- so a single scrape,
a rough-edged rasp, which carried
no meaning...
(was it the sound of a bird?)...
he could not tell; just the arrival
of sound, before you called it
sound, and it was just it,
what it was, and now he opened
his eyes, and the hill streamed in,
simply in that moment was,
where before it was not, as it
was again as his eyelids closed,
and the heat of the sun on his legs
as the bird, a different one,
called three single cries,
and as the wind moved again,
he smiled.

Richard Wehrman

From: Being Here

~

Photo taken by my brother
Bethel, Maine

 

A Fractured Reality - Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Our contemporary consciousness seems so fractured.

Even the pandemic has constellated more fissures in our culture,
more tribalism, more discordant voices... 

It is as if the very fabric or our consciousness has become
distorted, that sees truth as a primal adversary, from a fractured
sense of reality. 

...in our present collective consciousness, we appear to have 
crossed over into a country where simple truths do not
reach us - there is no shared sense of reality...

I watch the stories swirl around and wonder if they are just
nightmares of a civilization that has lost its way -
patterns of denial to distract us from the failures of our
culture, with its increasing divisiveness...

There is a deep need to turn.....to the simplicity of what is...
to the true nature of everything...
We need to find a pathway that can return us to wholeness....

I find the only way to return, to embrace reality, is through
what is most simple, most ordinary.  By noticing what is
around me, the sound of the wind, the rain falling.  There is
a Cherokee practice that is similar to [Buddhist] mindfulness,
called, "the sound of the green forest humming"; the awareness
of the sound of the forest, the sound of the water and our breath.
When people are very well attuned they hear a certain sound 
and are mindful of that sound.  When they don't hear it they
realize they have stepped into a place where their thoughts
have become unbalanced.

Ordinary, everyday awareness can return us to a place of 
balance, where we are part of the living community;
a community not of internet bubbles, but of a primal
awareness [of nature]. Walking through this gate that is
always open, we can return to a quality of consciousness
beyond truth and lies, one that is more primal, spontaneous.
...we can leave behind a strange fractured world of distortions
 and breathe in air that is not toxic, walk on land that is
still singing.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Sufi teacher

Excerpts from an article in
Emergence Magazine
called - A Ghost's Life