"The Mystery" never leaves you - John O'Donohue

"The Mystery" never leaves you alone.  Behind your image,
below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another
world waits.  A world lives within you.  No one else can bring
you news of this inner world.  Through our voices, we bring

out sound from the mountain beneath our soul.  These sounds
 are words.  There are so many talking all the time, loudly,
quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio in the paper,
 in books [on Facebook :)]. The noise of words keeps what we
call 'the world' there for us. We take each others' sounds and
make patterns and predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies.
Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call 'the world'
together.  Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes
the invisible to become visible.

Above us, galaxies dance out toward infinity.  Under our feet
is the ancient earth.  We are beautifully molded from this clay. 
Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older than us.  In our
thoughts,  the silent universe seeks echo.

An unknown world aspires towards reflection. Words are the
oblique mirrors which hold your thought.  You gaze into these
word mirrors and catch glimpses of meaning...
Behind their bright surface is the dark and the silence.  Words
are like the god Janus, they face inwards and outwards at once.

If we become addicted to the external our interiority will haunt
us.  We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or
deed can still.  To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our
vulnerable complexity.  In order to keep our balance, we need to
hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and
unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together.  No
one else can undertake this task for you.  You are the one and
only threshold of your inner world.  This wholesomeness is
holiness.  To be holy is natural; to befriend the worlds that
come to balance in you.

Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is
an artist in this primal and inescapable sense.  Each one of
us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries
and shapes a unique world.

Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a
visible sign of invisible grace.

John O'Donohue
from Anam Cara

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo from Unsplash

There Are No Frames for the Soul - O'Donohue & Rumi

We are no sooner out of the womb than we must begin the
precarious unfolding and shaping of who we are.  If we
have bad or destructive times in childhood, we begin to fix
on a survival identity to cover over and to compensate for
what happens to us.  If we are never encouraged to be
ourselves we begin to construct an identity that will gain us
either attention or approval.  When we set out to construct
our lives according to a fixed image, we damage ourselves.
The image becomes the desperate focus of all our longing.
There are no frames for the soul.
In truth we are called, in so far as we can, to live without
an image of ourselves, or at least to keep images we have
free and open.  When you sense the immensity of the
Unknown within you, any image you have built of yourself
gradually loses its promise.  Your name, your face, your
address only suggest the threshold of your identity.
Somehow you are always secretly aware of this.
Sometimes you find yourself listening to someone
telling you what you should do or describing what is
going on inside you, and you whisper to yourself that
they have not the foggiest idea who you actually are.

John O'Donohue
From Eternal Echoes

via - The Beauty We Love

~

I am not from the East or West
not up from the ground
or out of the ocean.
My place is placeless
a trace of the Traceless.
I am from the Soul of souls.

Rumi

True Emptiness - Dorothy Hunt

True Emptiness - which we could also call formless Spirit -
fills the universe and is filled by the universe.  It contains
everything, yet is not separate from a single moment's arising,
or dissolving.  What I am calling Emptiness is simply empty of
self, and empty of definition.  The word "Emptiness" is not
really it, neither are any of our ideas about it, including the
ones I use to try to point to the Mystery that is Unnamable
and indefinable.  To be emptied of our attachment to
definitions and concepts - especially our self-concepts - is
to be unburdened, whole, fluid and free to truly be.

To be empty means we are open; to be empty means we are
available for whatever or whoever is in front of us; to be
empty means we are not stuck anywhere, but can experience
the fullness and the flow of life unhindered.  Our seeing is
empty until it lands on an object, is it not? Our freedom,
inherent wisdom and selfless love arise right out of
Emptiness...

For a moment, just allow yourself to be the emptiness, open
and without definition, yet intimate with the moment as it is.
You might discover a vast and spacious Presence that feels
more real, more connected, more meaningful and lovingly
your truest Self than anything you could ever imagine.  And
even though the mind cannot say exactly what this is,
something knows; something in you remembers.
And what remembers tenderly holds anything that may arise
to be seen, experienced or liberated...

Dorothy Hunt
Buddhist Teacher

 

"Leaving" - Wehrman

Could he, he asked again,
walk out into the desert
of himself, let his self go.
the one built by the labor
of lifetimes - this one -
drop away into the ageless
void; and as he asked, he
knew; this is what it comes
to anyway, tonight as he
slept, or tomorrow, as the
result of old age, a natural
death, that waited closer
each day, a wordless chant,
it will all go, all of it,
castles and skyscrapers of
who you are, who you built
yourself to be; it ends at
the end - that's the idea - you
step from here, your
construction, into there,
the body abandoned - and
you saw it was not a despair,
but a ship to be boarded,
unmoored.....
free.....

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

Lunch with Mom...

I don’t talk about my mother much because this is a sensitive subject. Maybe you have mother issues that are still being worked through, like me. Others may have good relationships with their mothers. I am not one of the fortunate few. However, this is not a blog to rat on my mother, or complain about our wounded relationship. So I hope my readers and fellow meanderers will not hear any of this as judgment or criticism or complaining, or just the reiterating of yet another “story.” I see it as the continuous unfolding of two lives intertwined by birth, life, and the wounds of living. And hopefully I can bring some conscious awareness for myself through the writing of it.

The relationship with my mother can be strained and awkward, or it can be funny and humorous, as we navigate the wound-filled landscape between us – trying to avoid the deeper potholes. I admit I don’t spend a lot of time with my mother – on purpose – although I talk to her on the phone at least once a week to “check in.” Today she arrived after her Wednesday Bible Study group at her church for a planned lunch together. When we got to the restaurant she made a point to tell me that they discussed “not being judgmental” in the group this morning, and how much she believes in not judging others. You would have to know my mother to know just what a contradiction this is. Almost in the next breath she started criticizing a certain member of the congregation that wasn’t doing things the way *she* thought they should be done. Already I’m thinking, this is going to be a loonnnng lunch… Of course I tried to humorously point her back to what she had just told me about the not being judgmental discussion, to which she heartily agreed. Go figure. I think she doesn’t think that what she is saying is being “judgmental.” And in fact, after a little more complaining and “judging” on her part, and a little more humor about that fact by me, she said: I’m not judging, I’m just evaluating – to which we both laughed… I remember well my mother’s “evaluations” of my flaws :)

What she said made me think of how conveniently I give more subtle names to things so I don’t have to look at them, or myself, so I don’t have to admit that I am doing exactly what she is doing, or to not *see* something other than my self-constructed image. Like when I criticize my husband for some flaw (I learned well :) and I say – I’m just trying to help you! Yeah, like who am I to evaluate my husband’s behavior so that he can improve himself. Or as he reminds me, so I can get him to “perform” better. That’s still judging no matter what word I want to use to make *me* feel better… But this kind of awareness seems to elude my mother and she continues.

So I try to change the subject when there is a pause in the conversation, and I ask about one of my childhood memories, which was being sent to a woman for elocution lessons and also to what was called “finishing school” – lessons on how to walk and sit the “right” way. The proper etiquette if you will. So that, at the ripe age of 10 or 11, I might enjoy tea with white gloves and raised pinky with my friends??? Hello. Now if you knew me (and my family) you would know how laughable this is. And what a waste of money that was. We were a semi-professional working class family, not upper crust society. So why the speech and walking lessons I wondered. Her answer was revealing: So that I would know how to “act.” So that I would “fit in” and feel comfortable expressing myself with others (scripted on what to say). And I’m assuming that I would *look* “right” as well – in my black Mary Janes, matching purse and crisp petticoats. Oh yes, I remember. We went *grocery shopping* this way! Can you imagine!

My brother and sister also endured these elocution lessons and we practiced in unison: “RRRRRRollll on thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll on…” I’m sure my parents meant well, but it was interesting to hear what was important to them back then – looking and acting right, fitting in - the seeming foundation for their children’s well-rounded life, successful “careers,” and emotional stability – not. She will never know how utterly unprepared for life I have felt most of the time, because it wasn’t the acting or speech lessons, or “fitting in” that was needed. It was love, support and acceptance, not living up to an image of what I “should” be. Isn’t that really what we all want, what the “spiritual search” is really about – finding authenticity, finding out who we *really* are, and being seen for who we really are with complete and total acceptance, without judgment. But she has no clue that unwinding this conditioned construct has been a part of my life’s journey.

And so I commit to bring more conscious awareness to this learned habit of *unconsciously* commenting on the perceived flaws in others, wanting others to conform to the way *I* think they “should” be, or should behave, subtly trying to control life, and calling it something else. A lot of this has already dissolved, but there are remnants, especially with the people closest to me – like my mother: wanting her to be different than who she is, wanting her to genuinely see and admit her own flaws rather than judging everyone else’s, to somehow become conscious and quit deluding herself. But – that is the task that I have taken on for this lifetime, not her.

We actually had fun today, laughing and overlooking each others flaws, reminding me to just accept the way she is… At least for today…

Heart Smiles…