God Pours Light - Hafiz

God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching the darkness.

The proudly pious
stuff their cups with parchment
and critique the taste of ink

while God pours light...

And the trees lift their limbs
without worry of redemption,
every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls
with words that wet their parched
lips

as light
pours like rain
into every empty cup
set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.

Hafiz

Death is a Favor to us - Hafiz

Death is a favor to us,
but our scales have lost their balance.
The impermanence of the body
should give us great clarity,
deepening the wonder in our
senses and eyes
of this mysterious existence we share
and surely are just traveling through...

[.....]

...all I know of life and myself is that
we are just a mid-air flight of golden wine
between [God's] Pitcher and His Cup.

[.....]

...our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
of time and space cannot endure very long.

Death is a favor to us,
but our minds have lost their balance.
The miraculous existence and impermanence of form
always makes the illumined ones
laugh and sing.

Hafiz

~

In memory of my mother-in-law who passed from this life
Nov. 12, 2017 after lingering many years with Alzheimer's...
Death was indeed a favor to her, allowing her Essence to
"pass through" and "journey on" beyond the fields we know...

The Purpose of the Journey - Joseph Campbell

The purpose of the journey is compassion.

When you have come past the pairs of opposites,
you have reached compassion.
The separateness apparent in the world is secondary.

Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen,
but experienced, unity and identity in us all.

Joseph Campbell
from The Hero's Journey

~*~

Compassion is knowing that
you are part of everyone,
and everyone is a part of you - is you.
When seeing this there is no longer judgment,
just a deeper understanding and respect
for our humanity -
a deeper compassion.

In the deep Stillness of Being
there is a deep compassion for everything that is.

There is compassion for the world
when seen as a whole - in context.
The nature of our Being is deep compassion.

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
c. 2004-2006

~

Photo - from a friend of a friend...

Listen to Trees - Hermann Hesse

Trees are sanctuaries.  Whoever knows how to speak to them,
whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.
They do no preach learning and precepts, they preach
undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

[.....]

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer,
then a tree has something to say to us: Be still!  Be still!  Look
at me!  Life is not easy, life is not difficult.  These are childish
thoughts.... Home is neither here no there.  Home is within you,
or home is nowhere at all.

If one listens to them silently for a long time, it reveals its kernel,
its meaning.  It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's
suffering, though it may seem to be so.  It is a longing for home....,
for new metaphors for life.  It leads home.  Every path leads
homeward, every step is birth, every step is death...

When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and
the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve
an incomparable joy.  Whoever has learned to listen to trees no
longer wants to be a tree.  He wants to be nothing except what he is.
That is home.  That is happiness.

Hermann Hesse
Trees: Reflections and Poems

via: Love Is A Place

Happiness - Hermann Hesse

As long as you chase happiness,
you are not ready to be happy,
even if you owned everything.

As long as you lament a loss,
run after prizes in restless races,
you have not yet known peace.

But when you have moved beyond desire,
become a stranger to your goals and longings
and call no longer on happiness by name,

then your heart rises calmly
above the ebb and flow of action
and peace has reached your soul.

Hermann Hesse
translation by Ludwig Max Fischer

via: The Beauty We Love

Trust Your Vision - Ivan Granger

So often we pour ourselves intensely into life's purpose without
actually pausing to consider why we are doing what we are doing.
How is it a reflection of who we truly are?  How does it express
our specific qualities and role within the larger panorama?  What
does it imply about the fundamental nature of reality?

Rarely in the modern world are we encouraged to discover our
vision and dedicate ourselves to it.  To the prevailing mindset,
one's vision is thought to be intangible, suggesting something
that is a fantasy whose pursuit is narcissistic or even delusional.
The focus of life must be practical with goals that are approved
and easily measured.

That approach, while seemingly reasonable and safe, is
devastating to both the individual and to society as a whole.
While we certainly must live effectively within the physical
and social worlds that require a certain level of practical purpose,
we are not such stunted creatures that exist only on that level.
We are magical beings, here to embody immensity and love and
the will of the universe as it expresses itself uniquely through
each of us.

Vision is the way we discover our personal path through the world.
Vision is the way we come to know ourselves, allowing us to be as
we are, showing us how to act with strength and creativity in
service to our true [vision].

A vision is not the same as some fantasy or daydream.  A true
 vision is the voice of nature, the intention of the universe,
uniquely tuned to our soul.

The word "vision" can trip us up because we think of seeing
things that are external to our physical bodies, so we often
consider a vision to be external to us.  But vision in the
spiritual sense is the conscious mind's way to assign meaning
to the deep recognition of self as a harmonious expression of the
self-aware universe. In other words, vision is not so much about
seeing as it is about being.  A vision is a challenge to ourselves
to be more fully ourselves.  Vision is a vocation, the calling of
the soul to its true role.

The first question is, how strongly do we want to see?  And then
we must answer the second question, do we dare live the truth
seen?  Then again, what's the point to any other path but our own?

Ivan Granger
commentary on the poem
"Trust Your Vision" by Stephen Levine
Poetry Chaikhana

~

Photo - Sunset digitally enhanced...

Bare Awareness - Danna Faulds

Bare awareness
awake to its
true nature -
limitless and
vast, nothing to
grasp, no masks
or name tag.

What am I beyond
the answers of the
mind, outside
anything I can
find by seeking?

What is true
right now, and
what is transitory?

The witness watches
thoughts spin their
convincing stories
out of thin air and
doesn't care how
often I forget
that freedom is
the truth of being,
and no part of truth
is ever separate
from what is.

Danna Faulds
from: Limitless: 2009

~

Golden Sunset

Keeping Quiet - Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth
let's not speak in any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush...
we would all be together
in sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.

If we are not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Pablo Neruda
re: slowing down and living in peace with each other
English version Alastair Reed

~

Photo: Meditating Monk
Painting: "Canyon Spirits"
2013

see - "Canyon Spirits" - The Evolution of a Painting

Seek The Mystery - Ken Kesey

The answer is never the answer.
What's really interesting is the mystery.
...seek the mystery instead of the answer...
I've never seen anybody really find the answer.

They think they have, so they stop [seeking].
But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery...
Plant a garden in which strange plants grow
and mysteries bloom.

The need for mystery is greater than the need
for an answer.

Ken Kesey 
author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

In Our Consciousness of Time - Wendell Berry

In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past.  When
we say, "This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water," it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said, "now," it was gone.

If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of measurers we don't
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.

You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and alive, causing the heart
to sway in the rifts between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own.  This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.

Is it concentration of the mind
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.

Wendell Berry

From: Leavings
2007

via: Being Silently Drawn

Fantasia of Existence...

Sinking deeper into the calming comfort
of the rich darkness of the universe within;
floating into the depths of the inner Cosmos,
lanterns of light appear suspended in the dark;
stars - at the interior frontiers of beginnings,
before time, before relative reality, before "I" began,
in the space of Pure Silence...

Where the unmanifest spirals ItSelf into form;
into galaxies of molten stardust
rotating ever so slowly through the universe;
that also somehow became "me"!
For no reason - except
the pure pleasure of Being,
the pure pleasure of existing.

This fantasia of Existence,
fancied to be composed of
stardust and galaxies of liquid light
dancing through the universe -
inhabits this body...

Light and matter
vibrating together, in resonance,
like a tuning fork - enlivening this body,
all bodies, everywhere.

A symphony of Wonderment...

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 27, 2017

~

If a child is to keep his inborn sense of wonder
he needs the companionship of at least one adult
who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy,
excitement, and mystery of the world
we live in...

Rachel Carson

from a journal book called
Live In Wonder
by Eric Saperston

~

Photo - Vortex Art
craypas oils, done with fingers
2011

Live In Wonder - Bach, Monroe, Einstein

It must happen to all of us...  We pack up what we've learned
so far and leave the familiar behind.  No fun that shearing
separation but somewhere within, we must dimly know
that saying goodbye to safety brings the only security
we'll ever know.

Richard Bach

Quote from: Live In Wonder
a journal book
by Eric Saperston

~

Take wrong turns.  Talk to strangers.  Open unmarked doors.
There are so many adventures that you miss because you are
waiting to think of a plan.  To find them, look for tiny
interesting choices.

Randall Monroe

Quote from: Live In Wonder
a journal book
by Eric Saperston

~

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Curiosity has its own reason for existence.
One cannot help but be in awe when he
contemplates the mysteries of eternity,
of life, of the marvelous structures of
reality.

Never lose a holy curiosity.

Albert Einstein

Quote from: Live In Wonder
a journal book
by Eric Saperston

~

Photo - Leaves on grass, color digitally inverted

Shadow Life - Anais Nin

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world,
and you believe you are living.  Then you read a
book... or take a trip... and you discover that you
are not living, that you are hibernating.  The symptoms
of hibernating are easily detectable: first restlessness.
The second symptom (when hibernating becomes
dangerous and might degenerate into death):
absence of pleasure.  That is all.  It appears like an
innocuous illness.  Monotony, boredom, death.
Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing
it.  They work in offices.  They drive a car.  They picnic
with their families.  They raise children.  And then some
shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song,
and it awakens them and saves them from death.
Some never awaken...

Anais Nin

Limitless Awareness - The Tibetan Book of the Dead

You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless
range of awareness for which we now have no words; that
awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self,
your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned,
beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences
which usually separate people from each other and from the
world around them.

Walter Evans-Wentz
The Tibetan Book of the Dead

~

It's not so much that we don't have a self, rather it's that
the self we do have is not a thing.  It is an impermanent,
fluctuating activity, a process not a particle, a verb not a noun.

Shinzen Young

The Science of Enlightenment:
How Meditation Works


via - Love Is A Place

Perfect Unfolding - David Carse

The ultimate understanding is a seeing
and a knowing rather than a comprehending.
And it does satisfy all questions,
though not answer them.
Answers become as irrelevant
as the questions themselves;
both cease in the seeing.

Do not judge the questioning or the longing,
the seeking or the sadness,
the impatience or the resistance,
the opening or the letting go.
It is all the perfect unfolding as it is;
only watch it and know you are not that.

You are Loving Awareness in which all this arises.
You are Quiet Compassionate Space in which the life
that you think of as 'yourself' unfolds.

The Still Expanse of Acceptance between the thoughts
is All That Is.
That is What You Are.
Let the Love that is this Stillness that You Are
Embrace you,
Overcome you.

David Carse
from - Perfect Brilliant Stillness
no longer in print


Via - No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Folds in a curtain
photo turned on its side

Untitled - Danna Faulds

Put up no resistance to the day as it unfolds.
Watch the play of opposites, your likes
and dislikes, thoughts you would draw
close and those from which you would
recoil.  What if, for this moment, you let
it all be as it is?  What if you interfere
with nothing?

Become the subject - vast, bare, always
aware. Of course there are objects.  Do
not try to shut them out or change what
is.  Sense impressions, circumstances,
the day's events move forward on the
wheel of time while you are timeless, the
silent subject of the whole, pure
potential, simply there.

When the entire universe blazes into
being, take it all inside yourself, without
exception.  When the only word is "Yes,"
when your point of view dissolves into
every viewpoint and no viewpoint at all,
when the Big Bang is happening in
every instant, you are fully and finally
alive.

Danna Faulds
from the introduction to Limitless
2009

The Play of the Universe - Swimme, Esmann, Vaughan-Lee, DH Lawrence

...the universe is not simply a place but a story,
a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong,
and out of which we arose.

This story has the power to awaken us more deeply to who
we are.  For just as the Milky Way is the universe in the form
of a galaxy. and an orchid is the universe in the form of a  flower,
we are actually the universe reflecting on itself.

from - Journey of the Universe
Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker

~*~

The Absolute is both unmanifest and a dynamic creative force.
From the creative force everything arises; both the world
as well as personal consciousness.  Everything is a blissful play
of consciousness, not an unreal illusion.

Excerpt from an article by
Jan Esmann
Shaktipat Master

~*~

Everything is ultimately a story.
My "life" is a story,
your "life" is a story,
all occurring simultaneously within the
vast cosmic Ocean of Consciousness/Awareness.
The story of The Eternal is being lived here...

The Ineffable Mystery of the Universe
takes a journey through
the story of life - as us...
The "Divine Drama" *is* our story -
and our "story" is the "Divine Drama"...

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
2013

~*~

The real mystery is how IT unveils ItSelf within us:
how the Beloved makes ItSelf known to ItSelf
in the fragile container of the human being.

In the midst of the Divine Drama there is a
human story to be told. But it's all "God's" story

being lived in human form...

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Sufi Mystic

~*~

We must get back into relation,
vivid and nourishing relation to
the cosmos and the universe...
For the truth is,
we perish for lack of fulfillment
of our greater needs.
We are cut off from the great sources
of our inward nourishment and renewal,
sources which flow eternally in
the universe...

D H Lawrence

~

Photo - The Om Universe
Craypas oils over acrylic
a work in process... :)

Make a Covenant with the Mystery - Tom Spencer

...make a 'covenant' with mystery - by learning to stand in
relationship to what is known and unknowable at the very
same time.  I believe the essential trait that makes this
covenant possible is the capacity for wonder...

One need not peer off into the heavens to stand in
relationship with the mystery of our existence.  That
mystery is unfolding around us continually in a countless
variety of ways.  Our task is to pay attention - to stand
'with' means standing 'ready' by keeping our eyes, hearts
and minds open.  Even the most ordinary of experiences
has the capacity to change our lives...

Tom Spencer
from "Some thoughts about Wonder"

~

Photo from the Internet

The Soul of the Whole - Emerson

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole;
the wise silence; the universal beauty,
to which every part and particle is equally related;
the eternal One...

And this deep power in which we exist, and whose
beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only
self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of
seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle,
are one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
from The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The Over-Soul"

via: The Beauty We Love
and Love is a place

~

Photo - White Orchids color digitally inverted

Living the Balance - Sandy Jones

There is a perfect Balance between duality and non-duality.
There is a way of balance between the changing, ongoing
images of this time-space tangible world and the Living Light
of the unseen, changeless, Divine Principle, that stands behind
all things.

Living this Balance, is an inner knowing that keeps us steady,
true, strong and agile.  It is an ease and a dominion within us.
It is the perfect center within ourself.  We know it when we
find it.  It is real...  The Balance is a sweet place within, where
the heart and the soul come together.  Here, between the known
and the unknown, Something real, pure, unconditioned is found.
It is the original self...

How do we come to know this marvelous sense of Balance,
and know we know it?  How else, but by living the imbalance -
for a time.

...this Balance between the tangible world of multiplicity,
matter, time and change - and the intangible knowing, the innate
realization and understanding of the oneness of all things
[doesn't]  leave out any part of this Life.  It includes all
possibilities [all experiences].

This knowing is fearless, now enjoying the shadows,
the flickering light of this world, as part of the unfolding
beauty of it all.  The sweet balance leads us to a new way of
being and seeing, right here in the world - where Life Flows...

Sandy Jones

Excerpt from a post on her blog

~

Photo via No Mind's Land

The Ferocity of Your Own Being - Aisha Salem

Stop running from the ferocity of your own Being...
Burn off all your own games to that in you which is
Pure Intensity...
When you meet the very Core of your Being
become completely loyal to the deepest passion in you
and allow no more waste of time - find that devotion
to Reality [Truth] within yourself...

Aisha Salem

~

Photo - Reflection of sunlight from
fireplace insert on carpet :)

A luminous middle place - Matt Licata

Let us not forget the descendant current, flowing into the unlit
places, the lower worlds, and the dark caverns of the psyche.
The invitation here is one of embodiment - into the vulnerability,
the chaos, and the deflation that the path of the heart will
inevitably present us with for holding.

There is a cultural fantasy that we are supposed to know what to
do with our lives, that things are supposed to be clear at all times.
But love is full-spectrum and will use the energies of not-knowing,
disappointment and uncertainty as part of its revelation here.  The
process of dissolution is non-negotiable...
For it is by way of this sacred washing of the known that new
 forms can find their way here.

Even in the darkness, the numbness, and in the appearance that
nothing is happening, there is birth, but the new can never fully come
into being without an honoring of re-organization and death
 [of the old]. The challenge is that there is no map for this territory
 as it is too alive, too creative, and too wild to be pinned down,
 controlled, and known ahead of time.  While this degree of openness
 may be disorienting to a mind seeking resolution, it is exhilarating
in the heart, in the body, and deep within the soul.

It is natural and easy to disconnect from this [descendant] current, as
we overly identify with the ascending, the upward, the light, and the
transcendent.  In the rush to exit immediate experience - for something
that is higher, purer, less messy, and less contradictory - we turn from
the waters of life and lose touch with essence.

While it is natural to have a bias for one current over another, let us
not do so at the expense of fragmentation.  In ways the mind may
never fully understand, there is a luminous middle place where the
currents intertwine.  It is buried in the secret chamber inside your
own heart.

Enter there...
Rest there...
Play there...
Dance there...

Matt Licata

~

Art - Shadowy Caverns
Craypas oils done with fingers
2011

Deconstruction - Danna Faulds

I am deconstructing.

My identity, built
assumption by assumption,
is crumbling at my feet.
It's clear to me the way
of truth leads into the
unknown...

[.....]

Balanced on the rubble,
I grope for
handholds even as I try
to let go.  I am bared to the
bone by pain and the thwarted
desire to maintain control.  I
long to paint the scene the
way I want, while ignoring
how it is.  My practice now
isn't about rebuilding what
I knew.  It's not about
clearing the littered ground
of old illusions only to
construct new ones.
Emptiness has a stark
beauty, noticed only
when I stop looking
for security.  I sit on the
tumble of mortar and brick
and pray for patience,
pray for strength,
pray for the humility
to just keep breathing.

Danna Faulds
Excerpt from: "Deconstruction"
From: One Soul
2003

~

Art - Dissolving the Masks

2017