When I am not present to myself - Thomas Merton

When I am not present to myself,
then I am only aware of that half of me,
that mode of my being which turns outward
to created things.

And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them.
Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull
of the gravitation of love which draws my inward self
toward "God." [The Unmanifest]]

My will and my intelligence lose their command of the
other faculties.
My senses, my imagination, my emotions,
scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face
of the earth.

Recollection brings them home.
It brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit,
and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love
that reaches down into the Mystery...

Thomas Merton

from - No Man is an Island

via - The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - by Jacqueline Riman Photographer/Artist

via - No Mind's Land

Wild Portals of Unknowing - Fred LaMotte

"God leads every soul by a separate path." - John of the Cross

I cannot possibly know what is most important; that which will
transform me.  If I already know what it is I will never be free,
because I have packaged "liberation" as knowledge, in the tight
wrapper of a concept.  This means that spiritual transformation
can never become a program, a technique, or a course that I take.

The moments that liberate me are wild portals of unknowing,
when the blue sky of wonder outshines any cloud it contains;
vast emptiness shifts into the foreground; techniques, traditions,
concepts cultivated in the past, dissolve...

[.....]

The best meditation evaporates into amazement.  The best mantra
melts into silence.  The best guru dances in the mist at the edge of
a meadow, and disappears into your longing heart, where true path
has no beginning....

No, I cannot possibly tell what is most important - how a blue
moth disguises herself in a petal of lupine, why cascade lilies
frolic in a rainy mountain meadow, what the hermit thrush means
to silence.  I cannot know when the golden sun will burst my chest
wide open, turning the small dark chamber of self-doubt into a
boundless empyrean.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo - Vortex Art
2011

Primordial Pool of Silence...

Days unfold like rushing waterfalls.
Nights I welcome the silence;
just sitting, just being,
allowing
the flow of the day to come to the edge
and gently fall away...

A smooth, sliding movement
finding its own rhythm empties out
the eddies of life...

Letting go of trying,
trying to make sense of life;
trying to make something happen.

Just deeply resting...

Just falling off the edge,
effortlessly,
into the still pool
of Primordial Silence...

Mentations slip away;
the mind finally resting...

Feeling the gentle, rhythmic
movement of Silence envelope my being,
I fall into its soft crevice,
into the folds of deep Stillness,
the softness of just Being...

The Natural State...

Mystic Meandering
2012

~

FunQi Art
2009

UnKnowing - Chuck Surface

"The great religions are ships,
Poets, life boats.
Every sane person I know,
Has jumped overboard."

Hafez

~

My mind has lost its will,
To seek knowledge and understanding.
It no longer dreams of resolution,
To a Mystery beyond comprehension.

For after impassioned consideration,
It has concluded, rationally, empirically,
That Unknowing IS the resolution,
Any sane person will come to.

And from this Pregnant Fact is birthed...

The mind's Surrender,
The Heart having long ago Drowned,
In Love.

Chuck Surface

Facebook

~

I'm not "meditating", but Remembering.
Not in thought or image of something known,
Outside myself, something "other" there.
But a Feeling of my Essence, my Soul, Here.

And in that instant of Remembrance,
Before words, thoughts, or images can arise,
The whole of my Being Sighs in Ecstasy...

Chuck Surface

excerpt from Yes, and Yes
Facebook

Conflict - David Skitt

A Commentary on Krishnamurti's POV on the world

Conflict and violence Krishnamurti sees as issues of basic concern...
But in his view history shows there has been a repeated failure
of education, science, politics and organized religion to end them.
What is needed in our time therefore is to own up to that failure,
to make a clean sweep of all these past, defective endeavors,
and to adopt an entirely new approach.  It is hard to imagine taking
a more radical position than this: Put aside everything you have
 learned from others, ever read, and start your own inquiry into
what life is about, what really matters.  Stand on your own two
feet.  Stop being a second-hand human being.

He proposes that this means looking at what is actually
happening in life and in our consciousness - 'what is, not what
should be' - without condemning or justifying, without resisting
or wanting to change it, holding it instead 'like a precious jewel.'
In doing so, he says, we are looking at human consciousness,
not just our own.

A constant source of human confusion, in Krishnamurti's view,
is our rooted tendency to make images of ourselves, others, and
of life and death that are put together by thought based on memory,
on past experiences or hearsay.  Instead of looking afresh at what is
new in the now, being open to the unknown, and unpredictable, we
'translate the present into the past.'  He sees such images are
inevitably conflictual because they are time-bound and therefore
partial and inadequate.  Yet we frequently act as though we are
programmed by them.

Krishnamurti maintains that we fail to make the most of our
mind and our life while subject to latent or manifest anger and fear.
Also, our sense of self is usually experienced as inherently [separate]
from another's, whereas all human beings share far more
psychologically than separates them.  Not to see that is a huge error
of perception, because our sense of shared humanity is lost. This
feeling of psychological [separateness] breeds a fear of isolation
that leads, among other things, to a spurious sense of safety in
numbers, which is then, unfortunately and divisively, carried to
excess in nationalism, political ideology, and religious [fanaticism].
These provide a false cohesion held together by fear that there
are those 'outside' who threaten us and are in some way not as fully
human as we are.

Seeing the problems in our personal life and in the world with a
mind free from the dictates of the past, from faith, belief,
stereotyping, and fantasy, is to see that what goes wrong in the
world outside reflects what goes wrong in one's own mind.  This
is the share of all men, of all humanity, unless we all change,
each one of us, change to something that is not projected by thought.
Where there is insight into that, Krishnamurti says, there is a wholly
different way of living, in which an awakened awareness of what
causes human suffering also brings with it greater sensitivity to the
beauty and immensity of life.

David Skitt

KFT.org

via - No Mind's Land

Precipice - Fred LaMotte

The bold become themselves.  There is a point in meditation,
if it is true meditation, when you fall off the precipice of practice
into groundlessness...  You can no longer resist the subtle sorrow
in your flesh, that which the Buddha called Dukkha...

You've been carrying it for years, for centuries, the stuff made of
stories about a suffering 'me.'  It is buried deep in the rind of your
body, but neatly packaged in the sterile cellophane called 'spirituality.'

Now the time has come to let the wrapping go.  Be vulnerable to
yourself.  Allow your every distant ache, the brittle anguish of a
 trillion nerves, the  secrets of grief, the worms of rage, the clogging
 undigested waste of blame, this whole discomfort you are, to erupt
 in one magnificent purple blossom of pain, fragrant with the gift
 of tears. Let it flower from the subtle into the gross, gushing
 without name, and without distinction between good and bad,
beautiful or ugly.

It is just Dark Energy, percolating wordlessly out of your molecules,
yet pulsing with photons of fire and swirling suns.  It is holy
destruction and healing, cosmic in scale yet intimate with every
cell of your body.  It is the chaos of possibility.  It is the cleansing
smile of...No Secret Me Any More...
It is pure love, the stuff of your bones.

Be bold.  Let your edges dissolve.  There is no one else in all
the universe for you to become.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

Remembering Silence...

Sitting in the Sanctuary
of Silence,
the deep space of
Formlessness
keeps pulling me in,
enticing me to
remember,

to
listen
D

E

E
P

L

Y
.

.

.

In this space of Pure Awareness,
beyond thought,
I can feel the intimacy of Silence
once again;
The organic Rhythm,
immersed in its Quiet Flow...
Out of which all movement arises
and takes form...

Formlessness-Form
Form-Formlessness,
Not two - yet not one;
not either/or
but
both/and

The Ineffable Mystery

I sometimes call it "The Beloved",
sometimes now "The Unmanifest."

It has many names -
this Aware Silence,
this Hush of the Mystery
that we are,
that we emerged from,
Life ItSelf;
and is no-name as well...

The Unknown...

In this Sea of Silence
I remember the feel of
Its Rhythm;
the transparency and
boundarylessness
of its endless S p a c i o u s n e s s

that Just IS...

The Mystery of Life living ItSelf
in/as
the vast
and
rhythmic
pulse of Living Silence...

recognizing ItSelf as "me",
and "me" recognizing It
as my
Self

I had forgotten
this Sacred Silence
that knows us intimately
as ItSelf...

Our pain, sorrow, grief;
our laughter and joy,
are inexplicably
ITs own

Inseparable

It knows our shadow
and embraces
all darkness
as ITs own -
because
IT is -
ITs own

Light...

that knows
no darkness

The grief, the loss,
the sadness, the suffering,
the woundings...

ALL ITs own;

feeling what we feel,
experiencing what we experience
as ItSelf...

Ever-present
Ever-aware
Ever-open
to all experience

Not a cold, conceptual
hollow vacuum of Nothingness...

But the V a s t n e s s of Life ItSelf,
intimately living ItSelf...

OM-ing pre-Existence into Existence...
Breathing ItSelf into Life -
into every wound of pain
and suffering
with ITs soft caress...

Aware Living Silence

knows our Hearts

as ITs own,
and dances with
Joy
in
the
delight
of
knowing
it

.

.

.

I had forgotten THIS...
The feel of this deep intimacy
in ITs complete and utter Embrace;
Its total enfoldment;
Its inclusiveness
of all that we are;
forgotten the once known
innocence of
being touched
by the
Vastness
and
Depth
of

Silence

Mystic Meandering
April 11, 2015

The Embrace...

Everything is held in the Embrace of the Luminous Unmanifest...

~

This Eternal Embrace is
a dynamic stillness of Being
that holds everything as it is;
a holding space for everything to just Be...

~

We are held in this space of Divine Embrace -
a Vastness that just is...

~

There is only ever Embrace -
a deep compassionate Embrace for all life,
for all that is - as it is...

The Divine embracing Itself in every expression of Itself...

~

Everything is suspended
in this ubiquitous Presence of Life Itself...

Rest in This...

And when we emerge from our rest,
we realize that we ARE the Embrace -
embracing Itself.

We ARE fluidly and interchangeably the Embrace -

Divine Intimacy...

Sweet Serenity...

~

Notes from my journal - 2009

~

Photo from Shutterstock
digitally altered

Self-Compassion - Matt Licata

It is important to realize that the path of opening the heart
is not the same as becoming a receptacle for the unloading
of others' unconscious. unresolved beliefs, unprocessed
feelings, and unintegrated behaviors.  While "appearing"
compassionate on the outside, being an emotional doormat
involves the re-enacting of early unconscious dynamics.
We learned that devaluing ourselves, often in very subtle
ways, was the best route to get out needs met, to fit in,
to receive attention and affection, and to maintain a
precarious tie to an unavailable attachment figure
[parent]...to work through overwhelming states of
survival-level anxiety.

But the pathways within are luminous - neither solid
nor fixed - and can be reorganized around empathy,
kindness, and presence...  ...this possibility occurs
only by way of self-compassion and the unconditional
commitment to no longer abandon yourself...which
will require immense courage, care, curiosity and
embodiment.

Look carefully and see the ways you habitually
place others' needs over your own...not out of
true compassion for them, but a re-enactment of
an early environment of shame and unworthiness...
...lay down a new pathway [through self-compassion].
The pathway is grounded in self-care, which wisely
expresses itself in the skillful care of others, and
opens the doorway into the unfolding dance of self
and other and the eternal mysteries...

Matt Licata

Sacred Restlessness - Jeff Foster

Keep questioning everything you believe.
Question your concepts.  Question your religions.
Question everything your parents taught you.

Your gurus.  Your leaders.  Everything your learned
in books and on TV.  Everything is sacred and holy and
unquestionable.  Question it all.  Do not be afraid to lose
all your beliefs, all your prior reference points, all your
unshakable certainties.

With enough questioning, you may begin to question
yourself, the one who questions.

[Question] Everything you take yourself to be.

And then you will question the act of questioning itself.

Until there are no more questions. No more answers.

Just silence.  Stillness.  A wide open space...full of potential.

You will be left naked, open, raw, trembling, utterly vulnerable
to the sunset, penetrated by every sensation, shaken by the way
the light moves over the rooftops, the way sound enters you,
the color of a friend's eyes, the space and the contraction of
things,you will be one with it all, it will be your home and your
salvation, it will all break you and make you whole in every
instant.

You will have questioned yourself back into wonder, found your
true home in this fleeting world, followed your sacred restlessness
back into the deepest kind of peace imaginable.

Jeff Foster

~

Photo - Mandala Art Digitally Altered
This is exactly how I felt today, restless and unfocused...

Santiago - David Whyte

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside
hiding then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall,
and the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,

no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,
no matter that it had to break your heart along the way;
the sense of having walked from far inside yourself
out into the revelation, to have risked yourself
for something that seemed to stand both inside you
and far beyond you, that called you back
to the only road in the end you could follow, walking
as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice
that by night became a prayer for safe arrival,
so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place
you had lived in before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and mind and the promise
that first set you off and drew you on and that you were
more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:
as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city
with golden towers, and cheering crowds,
and turning the corner at what you thought was the end
of the road, you found just a simple reflection,
and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back
and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:
like a person and a place you had sought forever,
like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;
like another life, and the road still stretching on.

David Whyte
From Pilgrim

via No Mind's Land

~

Photo from In The Garden of the Beloved Facebook

"HERE" and "THERE" - Chuck Surface

There is a... a Space, Within,
A Place at the Very Heart of my Being,
Where Nothing exists, but Existence.

Not a space, of course, or a place, really,
But although unseen, ungraspable, "There",
It is Palpable, Visceral, Experienced "Here".

The Kingdom of Heaven, our Inner Sanctum,
"There", yet closer than the jugular, "Here",
The Essence we Are, before "we" are...

The "Am" before "I Am".

I will not speak for you, or others,
And become, thus, yet another theologian,
Preaching the "Truth" of all things.

But perhaps you have tasted this Wine,
Even if only as the Softest Ambience,
That Imbues, Surrounds, Enfolds in Love?

I am not in accordance with those,
who pronounce this Essence transcendent,
Beyond all qualities and attributes.

For when "I" Died, yet Remained,
An Attribute like non other was Revealed,
"There", at the End of all things...

Where Beginning and End do not exist.

A Rapture, an Ecstasy, beyond expression,
Beyond all dualities, without opposite,
"There", in the Heaven of Nonexistent Existence...

Where Heaven and Hell do not exist.

And a touch of that Ecstasy followed me "Here",
When "I" and Creation returned from "There",
So that "I" was never quite  "myself" again...

Where self in form and formless Soul coexist.

Existing "Here" as myself, but... not,
Moving in space and time, but... not,
Being both "Here" and "There"...

Where Space, Time do not exist.

Wounded and broken in my Humanity
But accompanied, through that Imperfection
By that Rapturous Perfection, Shining...

Where Perfect and Imperfect do not exist.

Chuck Surface

~

Photo - Mandala Art

Ode to Silence - Nazia Mallick

Silence is all about coming home to ourselves...
We look within and drop our opinionated mind
and learn to feel everything around us more deeply.

When the incessant chatter of the mind stops and
we let the quietness around submerge us, something
sacred is born within.

It is only in silence that we are capable of listening.
We learn to listen more when we are silent.

Silence is the basic ingredient allowing us to
enter our intuitive mind, and resist the
cacophony of meaningless noises outside.

It is interesting to note how Silent and Listen
have the same letters but are arranged differently.

We have forgotten the art of waiting and allowing
ourselves to grow silent within.

Nature thrives on silence.
We never hear the footsteps of the moon when it
appears in the sky.  We don't hear a loud bang when
the sun comes out and the stars burst open in the sky.
Their arrival is always wrapped in glorious silence.
Look how the tree knows it!  It remains bare,
beautiful and still; waiting for the new leaves, knowing
that the old has gone and the new will soon be coming.
The tree waits in silence.

Just like the tree, when we are silent and waiting,
something beautiful inside us keeps on growing
and it is stillness and silence that gives birth to creativity.

Often it happens that when we wait in silence, life
rushes back to fill those crevices in our souls.  There
are times when silence becomes the most potent way
of communication and is more effective than words.
To say nothing is often more difficult than expressing
anger, love and betrayal with words.

Being silent with a natural and calm stillness within
is like a spiritual reflex.  There is a space between
stimulus and response.  And in that space is our
power to choose our response.
That "space" is silence...

Each time I feel that I just cannot take another step
forward in life, I seek refuge in silence...

Nazia Mallick

Excerpt from an article found in Ode Magazine 2009

~

Shift your attention from words to silence
and you will hear...

Nisargadatta

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Into The Forest Alone...

"The Forest" traditionally is a threshold symbol of entering
the unknown, the deeper nature, or the spiritual world.  In
fairy tales it usually represents a passage though difficulties
and an opportunity for "transformation" of some kind.  I also
see it as a sanctuary, refuge, a place of deepening.  This
entering the "Dark Forest" happens sometimes when I have
lost (intentionally or otherwise) the framework which gives
structure to my life, when I must find my own way, and be
true to the call of Self,  Shamans, poets, holy men and women
sought refuge in the forest, as a healing place.  Going into
The Forest represents a return to the Primordial Self - beyond
societal, cultural, conceptual and spiritual frameworks.  In a
way, it is like returning to the child's heart of innocence -
just following the longing of the Heart once again; trusting
that I will emerge from "The Dark Forest" with clarity.  As a
child I often went into the forest next to our house as a place
just to sit, to listen and commune with nature, and write
poetry.  It was a place of directly experiencing what I knew
then to be "God."  Now known by other names...

And, since I don't have a "Dark Forest" handy, and I am spooked
by the things that go bump in the night, my Forest will have to
be that interior space of Silent Awareness - navigating the inner
Forest of the Unknown - as well as the unknown difficult
practicalities of everyday living.

I am willing, I say inwardly, to enter the Unknown - the Forest.
To trust Intuition to take me through.  I am ready to step over
the threshold and see where the Unknown takes me...

Care to join me :)  Are you willing...

~

"The familiar horizon has been outgrown;
the old concepts, ideals,
and emotional patterns no longer fit.
The time for the passing of a threshold
is at hand.

You enter the forest at the darkest point,
where there is no path.
Where there's a way or a path,
it is someone else's path;  each human being
is a unique phenomenon.

The idea is to find your own way..."

Joseph Campbell

~

Midway upon the journey of life
I found myself within a dark forest,
for the straightforward pathway
had been lost...

Dante Alighieri
The Inferno

~

Also see my post The Pathless Path

Wild Medicine - Summer Solstice - Brigit McNeill

I see your hurts, your fears and your sorrow.

I see them like crumpled black lumps,
and brittle edged bits that feel heavy
and uncomfortable in your flesh.
But I also see your immense bravery,
your wisdom and your courage.
It grows from you like tendrils of
medicine plants; wild and wise.
It's bigger than you realize.

You are so very courageous and you
can do big things, hard things,
beautiful things and
monumental things.

I wish you could see what shines from you.
I wish you could wrap those wild vines
of courage around you.
The ones of wisdom and truth,
of power and bravery.
Wearing them like a cloak, a dress or a
second skin; absorbing and feeling the
wild medicine it brings you, for you have
grown it from within, they are seeds of your
knowing and they can't be taken from you.

You have made it through everything
and now it's time to see yourself as the
warrior and tender lover of your own being.
The one who grows medicine weeds and
sweet flowers from the concrete cracks of
their life.

Brigit Anna McNeill

Art - Tomasz Alen Kopera

via No Mind's Land

Wishing everyone a renewed sense of strength and courage
on this Solstice...

I celebrate 10 years of posting on this blog today!
It's been a wonderful experience.
Thank you all for reading!

~

When you take off your clothes remember
to be thankful for your body underneath,
whatever shape it is.  It's your most tender
lover.  It's doing its best to swim upstream
against the current of all this entropy.
One day it will give up, exhausted,
and slip from you like those clothes,
and again you'll be thankful
for what's underneath.

Elias Amidon

Light in the Darkness - Matt Licata

In speaking recently with a friend, I was reminded of the great
bias in our culture toward the light and away from the darkness.
When we meet with someone who is down, feeling hopeless,
empty or otherwise not beaming and joyful, we can become
quickly convinced that something is wrong, that they are
"broken," and that we must act urgently to "fix" them.  We
scramble to put them back together, to remind them of all the
gifts in their life, impart spiritual techniques and philosophies
to them, suggesting that they just "focus on the positive", letting
know that everything will be better soon, and that it will turn out
okay.

...we might see the subtle aggression in this, this insistence that
they come out of their immediate experience and into the one
we believe they should be having instead.  We can start to see
how much of this "fixing" activity arises out of the disconnection
with that which remains unmetabolized within us.

It is possible the kindest thing we can offer our suffering friend
is to sit in the darkness with them... removing the burden that
they change, transform, feel better, or heal in order for us to stay
near.  As we turn to embrace our own unmet sadness, grief, and
despair, we remove the projection of our unlived lives from them.
We lift the weight that they take care of our unresolved anxiety
for us.

As we learn to trust and to rest in the wisdom-field of our present,
embodied experience, we see that love is a movement of totality.It is whole, and is raging and alive even in the darkness.

In the core of the fire, the sadness, the grief, and the despair
is something very real, breaking through the dream of
 partiality.  But what this is may never support our cultural
 and spiritual fantasies of a life of invulnerability.  Here, you
are being shown that the wild, untamed, creative movement
 of love will never conform to your hopes and fears, and that
things are unlikely to ever turn out the way you thought they
would.  This is not evidence that something has gone wrong,
but of how alive you are.

From the perspective of this radical sort of wholeness, every
experience is beheld as utterly valid, totally workable, and
an expression of the path itself.  Here there is no obstacle.
From the center of your being, it is seen that life is not only
the joy and the sweetness, but at times will arrive raging as
the darkness, in order to reorder your world and to remind
you of something you have lost contact with.  In this surging
of your inner family, the true nature of your experience will be
revealed, and the portals to Presence will be shown as they are...
as infinite.

May you stay close to your suffering and the suffering of others,
careful not to cut it too quickly, curious and available to the
wisdom as it unfolds in unexpected ways.  Open your heart to
the golden, full-spectrum nature of love and the jewels hidden
in the dark before you discard them, and finally see what it is
that they have to say.

Matt Licata

Photo from Matt's blog

Be What You Are - Hermann Hesse

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.  Home is neither here nor there.
Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees
rustling in the wind at evening.  If one listens to them
silently for a long time, this longing 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...

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy
before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts,
long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives
than ours.  They are wiser than we are, as long as we do
not listen to them.  But when we have learned how to
listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the
childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve incomparable
joy.  Whoever has learned how 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

from: Trees: Reflections and Poems

via - The Beauty We Love

~

To put it simply, let that mysterious grace move in your
spirit as it will and follow wherever it leads you.  Let it
be the active doer and you the passive receiver.  Do not
meddle with it, but let it be...  Your part is to be as wood
to a carpenter or a home to a dweller.  Remain blind
during this time cutting away all desire to know, for
knowledge is a hindrance here.  Be content to feel this
mysterious grace sweetly awaken in the depths of your
spirit.  Forget everything...

The Cloud of Unknowing

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

Subtle Truth - Lao Tzu

Why scurry about looking for the truth?
It vibrates in every thing and every not-thing,
right off the tip of your nose.  Can you be still and see it
in the mountain? the pine tree? yourself? 
Don't imagine that you'll discover it by accumulating
more knowledge.  Knowledge creates doubt, and doubt
makes you ravenous for more knowledge.
You can't get full eating this way.
The wise person dines on something more subtle:
He eats the understanding that the named was born from the unnamed,
that all being flows from non-being, that the describable world
emanates from an indescribable source.  He finds this subtle truth
inside his own self...
So who can be still and watch the chess game of the world?
The foolish are always making impulsive moves,
but the wise know that victory and defeat are decided by something
more subtle.  They see that something perfect exists before any
move is made.  This subtle perfection deteriorates when
artificial actions are taken,
so be content not to disturb the peace.
Remain quiet.
Discover the harmony in your own being.
Embrace it.
If you can do this, you will gain everything,
and the world will become healthy again.

Lao Tzu

via - The Beauty We Love

When Dark Clouds - Jamie K. Reaser

When the dark clouds lay thick
before you and the wind has
lifted your hair and taken it
someplace wild, do nothing.
Be no one known.
What has happened is moving
on to new horizons.  What remains
are the desires withstood and
all the unfinishedness that will
see you through to the next day.

copyright/ Jamie K. Reaser
From "Truth and Beauty"

~

The hurt you embrace becomes joy...

Rumi

Equanimity - Jack Kornfield

Even though we may cultivate a boundless compassion
for others, and strive to alleviate suffering in the world,
there will be many situations we are unable to affect.
The well known serenity prayer says, "May I have the
serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the
courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom
to know the difference."  Wisdom recognizes that all
beings act and receive the fruits of their actions.  We can
deeply love others and offer them assistance, but
in the end they must learn for themselves,
they must be the source of their own liberation.

Equanimity is the willingness to be in life, but to be
spacious and open, to have a vast perspective and be able
to say - "Yes, here I am, showing up, caring and loving,
but I'm not in control of this [situation].

Jack Kornfield
Buddhist Teacher

I learned several years ago that you cannot rescue
someone from their life...  I keep having to learn it...
Although it is hard to see someone go through what
they must go through until they learn to take responsibility
for their own lives and choices...

_/\_

Beyond "Spirituality" - MM & A.H. Almaas

Beyond the "cloak of spirituality" that we wear,
in its many guises, is the unconditioned Nature
of our own Being - the "Genuine Self",
the "Authentic Self", the "Precious Pearl"
at the depths of Beingness;
not the super-imposed conditioning of belief systems,
but the pure state of Being from deep within the
Quietness of Consciousness
that has no "belief", no conditioned *idea* of
"spirituality" - just pure Being,
living as we are...

Mystic Meandering
May 27, 2019

~

The non-dual realization is only a step toward
greater mysteries and forms of freedom
leading to the deepening realization
of the fullness of being human,
expressing the totality of the
cosmos in all its physical and
spiritual dimensions -
living the simplicity
of
ordinary life.

A.H. Almaas

~

Photo - Pikes Peak
taken from Greenland, CO

Waiting - Leza Lowitz

You keep waiting for something to happen,
the thing that lifts you out of yourself,

catapults you into doing all the things you've put off,
the great things you're meant to do in your life,

but somehow you never quite get to.
You keep waiting for the planets to shift

the new moon to bring news,
the universe to align, something to give.

Meanwhile, the pile of papers, the laundry the dishes, the job -
it all stacks up while you keep hoping

for some miracle to blast down upon you,
scattering the piles to the winds.

Sometimes you lie in bed, terrified of your life.
Sometimes you laugh at the privilege of waking.

But all the while, life goes on in its messy way.
And then you turn forty.  Or fifty.  Or sixty... [or 70] :)

and some part of you realizes you are not alone
and you find signs of this in the animal kingdom -

when a snake sheds its skin its eyes glaze over,
it slinks under a rock, not wanting to be touched,

and when caterpillar turns to butterfly
if the pupa is brushed, it will die -

and when the bird taps its beak hungrily against the egg
it's because the things is too small, too small,

and it needs to break out.
And midlife walks you into that wisdom

that this is what transformation looks like -
the mess of it, the tapping at the walls of your life,

the yearning and writhing and pushing,
until one day, one day

you emerge from the wreck
embracing both the immense dawn

and the dusk of the body,
glistening, beautiful

just as you are.

Leza Lowitz

Thank you to Ivan Granger at Poetry Chaikhana

~

Art by Barbara Stone