Inner Life - John O'Donohue

The visible world is only the shoreline of the magnificent
ocean of the invisible.  The invisible is not empty, but is
textured and tense with presences [energies].  These
presences cannot be named; they can only be sensed, not seen.

When you name a dimension of your experience, one of your
qualities or difficulties...you give it an identity.  It then responds
to you according to the tone of its name... 

The wildness of the invisible world is nameless.  It has no name.
A first step towards reawakening respect for your inner life
may be to become aware of the private collage of dead names
you have for your inner life.  Often the experiences of
wilderness can return us to the nameless wildness within.  
Sometimes, go away to a wild place of your own. Leave
your name and the grid of intentions and projects and images
which mark you out as citizen Z.  Leave it all and let yourself
just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness.[rhythm]
You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells, and mountains
that you will rediscover,  territories which have been buried
under well-meant but dead names.  To go beyond confinement
is to rediscover yourself.

John O'Donohue
from Eternal Echoes

~

Photo taken by my brother
Plum Cove Gloucester MA

 

The Invisible One - Nag Hammadi Scrolls

I am thought that lives in the light.
I live in everyone, and I delve into them all...
I move in every creature...

I am the invisible one in all beings...
I am the voice speaking softly...

I am the real voice... the voice from the invisible thought...

It is a mystery...  I cry out for everyone...

I hid myself in everyone, and revealed myself
within them, and every mind seeking me longs
for me...

I am she who gradually brought forth
everything...

I am the image of the invisible spirit...
The mother, the light... the virgin... the
womb, and the voice...

I put breath in all beings.

Nag Hammadi Scrolls
from: Why Religion, Elaine Pagels

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

Photo - Sri Yantra necklace

 

 

Inner Life - John O'Donohue

The visible world is only the shoreline of the magnificent
ocean of the invisible.  The invisible is not empty, but is
textured and tense with presences [energies].  These
presences cannot be named; they can only be sensed,
not seen.

When you name a dimension of your experience, one of
your qualities or difficulties... you give it an identity.  It
then responds to you according to the tone of its name...

The wildness of the invisible world is nameless.  It has no
name.  A first step towards reawakening respect for your
inner life may be to become aware of the private collage
of dead names you have for your inner life.  Often the
experiences of wilderness can return us to the nameless
wildness within.  Sometimes, go away to a wild place
on your own.  Leave your name and the grid of intentions
and projects and images which mark you out as citizen Z.
Leave it all and let yourself just slip back into the rhythms
of your intimate wildness.  You will be surprised at the
lost terrains, wells, and mountains that you will rediscover,
territories which have been buried under will-meant
but dead names.  To go beyond confinement is to
rediscover yourself.

John O'Donohue
from: Eternal Echoes

~

Photo - taken in Gloucester MA
 by my brother

For Grief - John O'Donohue

When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid and undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.

Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And, when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From the gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
in your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return...

John O'Donohue

from: To Bless the Space Between Us

~

Photo - from Keukenhof Tulip Garden in Holland
by Ellen Ratmeyer

~

The world still grieves its losses...
And the hatred and tragedies that keep occurring...

Untethered...

Untethered I step off into "space" -
the spaciousness of Just Being.
Flying into the vast unknown;
Invisible inner Forces showing me the way -
if I allow them to...

Not trying to "direct" my own way
by what I had known before;
letting the conceptual veils drop away...
Remaining open to an Invisible Force
at the Core of my Being -
the Inner Essence of what
makes me - me;
not an abstract construct,
but Life living ItSelf as me...

Mystic Meandering
Nov. 29, 2019

~

Art - Untethered Heart
craypas oils
2009

digitally altered

"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

The Invisible World - John O'Donohue

When you enter the world, you come to live on the threshold
between the visible and invisible.  You bring with you a sense
of belonging to the invisible that you can never lose or finally cancel.
There is always some magnet that draws your eyes to the horizon or
invites you to explore behind things and seek out the concealed
depths.  You know that the real nature of things is hidden deep
within them.

When you become aware of the invisible as a live background,
you notice how your own body is woven around your invisible
soul, how the invisible lives behind the face of those you love,
and how it is always there between you.  The invisible is one
of the most powerful forms of the unknown.  It envelopes our
every moment.  It is the region out of which we emerged and the
state we are destined for, yet we never see it...

John O'Donohue

Excerpt from: Eternal Echoes

~

Be sure to click on the full screen icon on the video
for the full effect.

Tell us of Pain - Khalil Gibran & Nisargadatta

And a woman spoke saying:

"Tell us of Pain"

And he said:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your
understanding.  Even as the stone of the fruit must break,
that its heart may stand in the sun,
so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily
miracles of life, your pain would not seem less wondrous
than your joy.  And you would accept the seasons of
your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons
that pass over the fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of
your grief.

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within heals
your sick self.

Therefore, trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence
and tranquility.  For his hand, though heavy and hard, is
guided by the tender hand of the Unseen.

And the cup he brings,
though it burn your lips,
has been fashioned of the clay
which the Potter has moistsened
with His own sacred Tears.

Khalil Gibran

The Prophet


~

The real world is beyond the mind's ken;
we see it through the net of our desires,
divided into pleasure and pain,
right and wrong, inner and outer.
To see the universe as it is,
you must step beyond the net.

Look at the net and its many contradictions.
You do and undo at every step.
You want peace, love, happiness
and work hard to create pain, hatred and war.
You want longevity and overeat,
you want friendship and exploit.
See your net as made of such contradictions
and remove them...
Your very seeing them will make them go.

Nisargadatta

Invocation - Dolores Stewart

You who were with me before I was born,
dark shining on dark,
be with me now.
You who will stay with me after I die,
light traveling on light,
be with me now.

You who are nameless
in the marketplace of the ten thousand things,
how shall I call you?
You who are invisible between the stars,
how shall I see you?

You who nurture me with silent wisdom
speak to me now.
I am listening beyond the sounds of night,
I am looking beyond the sights of the day.
You who fill the infinite void,
travel on my shoulder now,
show me the way.

Dolores Stewart
From - Doors to the Universe

Via: Beyond The Fields We Know

~

The desire to go home
is a desire to be whole,
to be the point of intersection
of all the lines drawn through
all the stars...
that center called love.
To let the soul go wild,
to cease to speak
and be perfectly
understood.

Rebecca Soinit
Excerpt from - Storming The Gates of Paradise

(Ms. Soinit's words, my format)

On the Threshold of Winter...

Well actually I think we’ve crossed it.

Winter arrived this morning in all its beauty...

At least 6-8 inches of snow covered everything.

The leaves still on the trees twittered in the wind.

Evidences of an invisible hand leaving its signature behind…

~

Excerpt from: Eternal Echoes
by John O’Donohue

“Within and around us there is an invisible [Formless] world; this is where each of us comes from.  Your relationship to the invisible influences so much of your life.  When you cross over from the invisible into the physical world, you bring with you a sense of belonging to the invisible that you can never lose or cancel.  Under the guise of emptiness, the invisible keeps its secrets to itself.  Yet the invisible remains the great background.  There is always some magnet that draws your eyes to [It] or invites you to explore behind things and seek out the concealed depths.  Your longing for the invisible is never stilled.  You know that the real nature of things is hidden deep within them.  When you enter the world, you come to live on the threshold between the visible and the invisible.  You are both artist and pilgrim of the threshold…”