Silence Creates Space - Rollheiser & Jung

There's a language beyond words.
Silence creates the space for it.
Sometimes when we feel powerless to speak words
that are meaningful, when we have to back off into
unknowing and helplessness, but remain in the
situation, silence creates the space that's needed
for a deeper happening to occur.

Ron Rollheiser
from - The Healing Place of Silence

~

Silence is for me a fount of healing
which makes my life worth living.
Talking is often a torment for me,
and I need many days of silence
to recover from the futility of words.

C.G. Jung

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

What Calls the Eye to See - Adyashanti

What calls the ear to listen or the eye to see
more than the surface facade that shrouds our essential spirit?
Parting the strata and dross, what is essential picks its way
through the manicured narrative of endless lives.  In each
moment of every day, Truth is not lacking or held in
abeyance for some later date; it is given in full measure,
and abundantly so.  Do not be afraid of what appears to be
chaos or dissolution - embrace the full measure of your life
at any cost.  Bare your heart to the Unknown and never
look back.  What you are stands content, invisible,
and everlasting.  All means have been provided for our
endless folly to split open into eternal delight.

Adyashanti
2012

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Storm Cloud at Sunset

Our Fundamental Nature - Zen Master Daehaeng

The invisible energy of the Universe
is our Fundamental Nature, our underlying Essence,
the True Self, the Mind of the mind.  It is the
Essence that moves us; is not separate from the
"false self".  Our "True Self" is the basis of the "false self."
 There is nothing that is not my-self.
If I know something, the Universe knows it; nothing
is secret.  "The work" is to experience this True Nature
for yourself; to completely rely upon our True Nature,
our inherent Nature.

Entrust everything that confronts you, both good
and bad, to that Fundamental Inherent Nature.

~

Truth does not depend upon the existence of the
teachings of an "enlightened" person.

~

Inside death, life already exists.  And inside life,
death already exists.
Death is just putting on a new set of clothes.

Zen Master Daehaeng

Korean Buddhist

Excerpts from - No River To Cross

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

Let everything touch your Heart
and see how your view of the world changes.

MM

The World in Different Light - Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller
1924-2020

Original title - "Monet Refuses Operation"

"Her poems are 'a testament to the miraculous power
of language to interpret and transform our world'
and 'a testament that invites readers to share her vision
of experiences we all have in common: sorrow,
tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and
mortality - 'the hard dry smack of death against the glass'"
(Washington Post)

Lisel Mueller was a German born American Poet.
Her family fled the Nazi regime in 1939 when she was 15.
She worked as a translator and academic teacher.  She
began writing poetry in the 1950's, publishing her first
collection in 1965.

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
street light through ice on window...

Grief as passageway of the Soul - Matt Licata

Grief is not something we "get over" by following pre-prescribed
stages, but a partner that we dance, play, honor, argue and weep
with as the cycles unfold.  It's appearance and the ways it longs
to be tended are unique for each psyche, heart, and nervous
system.

The timeline for this voyage is not knowable by the psychiatric
community, nor by insurance panels, or teachers of spirituality,
but is birthed in the heavens.  To rush, force, or pathologize
the experience of grief is to work against nature.

The grieving process [for all forms of loss] may not have an
endpoint or state of completion in which we come to some final
resolution, where we "finish" and land in some untouchable [more
spiritual] place, free from our embodied vulnerability, somatic
aliveness, and from falling apart and breaking open yet again.

While some may hold this fantasied end state as a goal which
comes about as we "master" [or "spiritualize"] life, the heart is
not interested in mastery.  But in entering the mystery in more
subtle and sensitive ways.

The heart itself is endless, and the visitors of grief may companion
us in their various forms for a lifetime.  Not come to harm, but
to reveal a portal into depth.  Shifting shapes, circulating, and
rotating, as they open and close passageways in the landscape of
the soul.

Grief is not so much a process that we "make it through", but a non-
linear unfolding, shepherd and emissary of the unknown.  It moves
not by way of straight line, but by that of circle and spiral.

Matt Licata

~

It is not an error
that you have been born
 a sensitive human being,
with a tender nervous system
and a heart that is sometimes
broken.

The tenderness there,
the shakiness, the grief...

not an error
to be remedied

or cured...

[or spiritually bypassed]

But a doorway to Essence,
a portal to Life.

Matt Licata

Why We Fear Death - J. Krishnamurti

Questioner: The fact that death stares everybody in the face,
yet its mystery is never solved.  Must it always be so?

Krishnamurti:  Why is there fear of death?
When we cling to continuity, there is the fear of death.

There is fear of death as long there is the desire for
continuity [of the] character, in action, in capacity, in the
name, and so on.  As long as there is action seeking a result,
there must be the thinker who is seeking continuity.  Fear comes
into being when this continuity is threatened through death.

So, there is fear of death as long as there is the desire for
continuity.

Death, the state of non-continuity, the state of rebirth, is the
unknown.  Death is the unknown.  The mind, which is the
result of continuity, cannot know the unknown.  It can only know
the known.  It can only act and have its being in the known,
which is continuous.  So the known is in fear of the unknown. 
The known can never know the unknown, and so death
remains the mystery.

Immortality is not the continuation of "me."  The me is of time,
the result of action towards an end.  So there is no relationship
between the me and that which is immortal, timeless.  We would
like to think there is a relationship, but this is an illusion.  That
which is immeasurable cannot be caught in the net of time. 

J. Krishnamurti
excerpt from a talk in Bombay in March 1948

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Loom of Weaving...

Withdraw from the Loom of Weaving;
the mind-made threads, the mind-made
rhythms, and find the Silent Thread
that weaves through all other threads.

The True Rhythm of Life.

Stay with this silent, organic Rhythm
that flows through you.

Put all other synthetic threads aside and
follow the Silent Thread...
Follow the deeper Rhythm...

Wait in Silence
until you feel the True Rhythm within...
The Rhythm of Silence.

Follow this Rhythm to the Source,
like a stream that flows to a River,
that flows to the Ocean.
Find the Source in the Rhythm...

Where does it take you?

Into the depths of yourSelf -
the depths of your Beingness,
the depths of Silence...

Attune to that Rhythm...

Mystic Meandering
Aug 27, 202

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

"The Friend" - "The Guru"...

"The Friend" - "The Guru"
is not a person -
but the Presence at the Core of your Being...

"The Friend" - "The Guru"
knows your Heart
and responds to your Heart
with the felt sense of Presence -
embodied...

"The Friend" - "The Guru"
is seen only with "Felt Sight"*
from within...

It holds no identity, no title, no status
and no space or distance
from you...

You are always sustained in
The Silence of "The Friend" - "The Guru."

Get to know "The Friend" - "The Guru",
which is the Silence at the Core of your Being...
It will teach you what you need to know...'

Sit with "The Friend."

Befriend "The Friend."
Do not look to the world
to befriend you...

Mystic Meandering

Aug 2020

*Note - Thank you to Ginny Lonsdale
for her words "Felt Sight" :)

See her wonderful website/blog with
writings and poetry @
Footnote from a Moment

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

"Spiritual Teachers" - Jeff Foster

'Spiritual teachers' [of certain traditions] often talk of pure
Awareness that doesn't suffer, a formless consciousness
untouched by form...

They speak of a state in which anger, fear, confusion and doubt
do not arise.  Or if they do it's a 'sign' that we are 'not there yet.'

How ironic, a non-dual teaching that is deeply dualistic at its core,
and deeply shaming of our vulnerable humanity,
and deeply, deeply unconscious of this.

What kind of 'Oneness' does not radically include all of her forms?
What kind of ocean does not embrace, and infuse, every single one
of its precious waves?

'Spiritual teachers' tell us that there is no goal, nothing to attain,
and they are not special in any way.

Yet - in the same breath, they speak of the 'falling away' of the
'separate self'', the sudden or gradual 'death of the ego', the
silencing of their mind, and how they achieved states of
permanent bliss, peace and equanimity.

They speak of non-judgmental love, yet judge and guilt-trip
and correct their students for having fears, doubts, annoying
questions and... resistance!  They make their students doubt
their own experience.  They claim to be 'enlightened', yet
judge others as not being 'enlightened.'

They identify themselves as having lost their separate self,

yet speak of having no identity at all....

The mind is an addict.  It is desperate for somewhere to land.
Some certainty. Some dogma. Some 'true teaching'.  The mind
will addict itself to even the most beautiful, refined,
spiritual concepts:
'I am pure Awareness.'
'I am not the body.'
'There is no separate self.'
'It's all an illusion.'

Avoiding the tender, moment-by-moment embrace of our
fragile, fleshy, muddy, messy humanness.

Our confusion is clearly lovable.Our doubts are certainly sacred.
Our longings, aches and wounds are not signs that we haven't
 reached the correct state, or that we are far from the Promised Land.
They are holy sites in us themselves, expressions of the
One Life that cannot be uttered.

There are no experts, no 'enlightened' ones,
no authorities...

Just willingness to not know.
To begin again.  And again.
To soften into the grieving heart...

The broken heart is holy.

I reject any spirituality that cannot see the grace in that.

I reject any spirituality that doesn't allow us to be fully human.

If "spiritual teacher" means someone who sees the 'fierce grace'
in the pits of suffering, and the unspeakable beauty in our
wounded and tender places, and the non-duality shining brightly
in the damn chaos, and the ever-present existence of a Love so
vast, it cannot be understood by mind - a Love that loves our
imperfections and mistakes, and embraces them in loving
awareness in each and every moment of our lives -
then sign me up!

Jeff Foster
Former Non-Dual "Spiritual Teacher"
Excerpt from - "Why I Resigned As A "Spiritual Teacher"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Meeting Life As It Is...

I used to think the goal was to "awaken"
from life as it is - to be "enlightened."
And everything would be "different:"
easier, more fluid; things would just fall into place;
that "I" would be "different" - changed somehow.

But it seems the real "awakening"
is about keeping the heart open to
life as it is - not dismissing it or others
as an "appearance" only;
detached from life...

But seeing beyond the "appearance" to the Real;
the Formless in form;
Seeing the Real Being behind the eyes...

Showing up for life and doing what is needed
with mindfulness, kindness and compassion.

Allowing ourselves to be touched by others
and their life circumstances means being
vulnerable and open -
not having the "answers",
or hiding behind the comforting certainties of
a "belief system."

It means forgiving the frailties of others
and accepting one's own...
Not dismissing others as part of an illusion, part
of a dream; not buying into the dream of separation
by denying life...

"Awakening", it seems  is about meeting life as it is,
living amidst the disturbances of life,
discovering and acknowledging the Real Being in
oneself and others;
surrendering to the immensity of "The Mystery"
living ItSelf in the every-day-ness of life...

Mystic Meandering
Aug 2020

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Red glow of sun from the wildfires in Colorado
and California...

Primordial Love...

The Love that emerges from the Heart
when that Inner Sanctuary opens ~

Just Is...

Just Loves

Love ~ loving

A causeless Love

My first glimpse left me in awe
of its Vastness...
its Clarity...

its Lovingness...

This Love doesn't love
"because of"...

It loves without reason...

It is Primordial Love ~
Unconditioned

Untouched

It loves "just because" ~

because it IS Love...

Love beyond comprehension...
Love beyond "love"...

How could one possibly
comprehend the
limitless,

unbounded,
uncontained
Love
that

just

IS

~

~

~

Effluent Love
flowing from ItSelf

Endlessly
~
~
~

It is not an object called "love"
or an attribute that "I"
can achieve or attain...

But is the pure,
perpetual

GLOW

of

Effulgent Primordial Love

Self-sustaining, self-generating
 Brilliance
from
the Heart of Hearts

L~O~V~E

Mystic Meandering
2015

~

Photo Aurora Borealis from a calendar

"Freinds" - Oriah

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for, and if you
dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are.  I want
to know if you risk looking like a fool for love,
for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring
your moon.  I want to know if you have touched the
center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened
by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed
from fear of further pain.  I want to know if you can sit
with pain, mine or your own without moving to hide
it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own,
if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill
you to the tips of your fingers and toes without
cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember
the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is
true.  I want to know if you can disappoint another to
be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of
betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be
faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it's not
pretty every day, and if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours
and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and
shout to the sliver of the full moon, "Yes!"

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how
much money you have.  I want to know if you can
get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and
bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for
the children, [or your elderly parents, your spouse, or a
dying loved one].

It doesn't matter to me who you know or how you came
to be here.  I want to know if you will stand at the center
of the fire with  me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or with whom you have
studied, [what your title is, or "spiritual" status].  I want to
know what sustains you from the inside, when all else falls
away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if
you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

[This - is Love].

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Original Title - "The Invitation"

[brackets mine]

~

Photo - 5 baby raccoons:)
The Mama is on the other side of the fence
coaxing them over...
early June 2020

Out of the Unseen - Matt Licata

In an environment of "embodied attunement", we are able to
rest in the mystery of Being.  We can explore unstructured
states of consciousness and enter courageously into the dark
and into the light.  In this sense, love is an alive field of
presence in which experience can unfold into greater levels
of integration and cohesion.

From this perspective, "I love you" = "I allow you."  I can
allow you to have your own experience, to organize and make
meaning of the world in the way that you do.  I can allow you
to be what you are.  While I will not allow you to abuse me or
to act violently or break the agreements and boundaries we
have established, I can allow your experience to be what it is,
and unfold the way it does.

By meeting people where they are we can be vehicles of love...

We can enter into friendship with another and their experience
as it is, but not so close that we lose perspective and become
emotionally fused...  In this sacred middle territory we offer
the gift of our "attuned presence" - the offering of pure space...
For space is our true nature.  By resting in the organic space of
Being.....we do not need people to be different, to change, to
become "awakened", to be in "high vibration", or to "heal" in
order for us to love them.  We also will not place the burden
upon them to take care of our unlived lives and unmet
emotions for us, and we will honor their unique process and
journey, by being there for them if we are needed.

We can provide the same space for ourselves.
In any here and now moment, we can discover that our
nature as Awareness Itself is in fact the ultimate holding
environment.  While as an infant we depended upon
another to provide this environment for us, in which we
could rest in Primordial Beingness, it is actually here at all
times.  It is here now, pouring out of the unseen and soaking
into ever cell and strand of DNA.

With eyes and heart wide open.....just look and you will feel it
surrounding you... right now.  While we may not always
understand our experience [or others] - and while it may never
conform to our ideas, hopes, and dreams about the life we were
"meant to live" - we can come to trust that it is unfolding
uniquely, emerging out of the unseen hand of Love.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Mammatus Clouds.
See the two hands with forearms
reaching down, from right upper corner
to center of photo :)

"Be There" - Jeff Foster

You cannot truly "be there" for another
until you learn to "be there" for yourself.

Be there.  Be a loving witness
to the extraordinary power that moves through you.
Be there for all your feelings, not just the pleasant ones.
Be there for the grief and anger, too.

The ease and frustration.

Be there for the sorrow, the emptiness and the fullness,
the wildness and the calm, the life and the dying.
Be there for all your thoughts.
The ones you love and the ones you hate.
The ones that scare you and the ones you seek.
Be there as they arise and dissolve.
Stay there as they stay and go.
Be there for the broken heart
and be there for the healed one too.
Be there for the answers,
but don't abandon the questions either.
Be there for the clarity,
but don't neglect the confusion.

Be there for all of yourself.
Like a mother, there for her children.
And you will be able
to be there for all of me...

Jeff Foster

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Unconditional Love - Adyashanti

I don't know about you but -
I've been experiencing a lot of anger and frustration lately
with the current world situation, with the crazy politics, and
"the Vid" that has brought drastic changes personally, socially
and economically to many.  Life, as we know it, is changing,
has changed, and obviously will continue to change.  That's
what life does, requiring adjusting and adapting on all levels.
A hidden Movement in the unseen realm is evidently underway
in the current experience that we don't understand...

I know this, but - I'm not "feeling the love",
so-to-speak, toward the current "now."  Instead, I feel
frustration and anger - feeling curmudgeonly...

One day this week, after listening to a Deva Premal
sanskrit chant on you tube, I switched over to a guided
meditation by Adyashanti on "The Unconditioned Nature of
Being.", trying to assuage the inner anger and frustration
that consistently arises within.  But I couldn't listen to it, my
mind was caught in the emotions within, which led to a belief
that I had somehow lost the ability to "love" - overwhelmed
by the intensity of the feelings; defining "love" as the ability to
feel "love" for everybody and everything at all times despite
the current stressful times we live in.  I'm no saint, just a mystic
wanting to realize the Mystery of Existence.

Then something caught my attention in the right hand margin.
Another video by Adya called, "What Is Unconditional Love?"
It was like "The Universe" had responded!
I watched the video, and I listened   He said:

We personalize unconditional love.
We imagine how it should be.
But it's not personal.
It's more like acceptance of what is.

Existence is unconditional love.
Existence allows you to be the person you are.

To *try* to be unconditionally loving will place a demand
on you which will take you away from it.

Existence unconditionally accepts.  It is unconditional love...
[which is acceptance of the totality of life experience].

Realize your Self/True Nature...

Realize what you are and unconditional love will reveal
itself to you...

Don't fight the "conditioned nature", which is the ideas of
unconditional love; images of it, etc.

We don't know what it is.

Allow yourself not to know.

[In other words, don't try to define it, or be it,
just allow it to find you...]

Adyashanti
Excerpts from: "What is Unconditional Love?"

You Tube video

Of course not all may agree, depending on your belief system,
but it was the medicine I needed to hear at that time: that it's
not about trying to be "loving", but that "love" is being able
to accept what is, accepting others as they are, and also,
accepting ourselves and what we are going through -
as we are.

I also found that metaphorically "stepping back" (internally)
from the intensity of my emotions, and how I am playing
 in the Divine Drama, and just resting in the Core of my Being
 helped.  From there I understood that "love"/acceptance will arise
in its own time; that I was grasping after love, because I thought
 I lacked "love",  when what I lacked was the felt sense of my own
 Core Being.   That was the key piece that I needed to realize,
to "step back" into the Core, and ride out the emotional roller
coaster ride that so many of us are still experiencing in this
"now."


Namaste
_/\_

~

Photo - from a friend, of a friend, of a friend

Embracing the Reality of Sorrow - Adyashanti

Sooner or later we will all experience the tragic quality of life.
Perhaps this quality of life is brought to us through illness, or
the death of a loved one, or losing a job, or an unexpected
accident, or having your heart broken.  But we will all
experience this tragic quality of life in both small and
overwhelmingly large ways over the span of our lives.
Whether we want to face it or not, life, with all of its beauty,
joy, and majesty, also has a tragic element to it.  This is
exactly what the Buddha saw, and it inspired his entire
spiritual search.

It seems that most people look for various ways to escape
from this tragic quality of life, but ultimately to no avail.
There is no escaping it.  And it must be faced sooner or
later.  The question is, when we are faced with this aspect
of life, how do we respond?  Surely, to avoid it only leads to
denial, fantasy, life-numbing withdrawal, cynicism, and fear.
It takes great courage to face the totality of life without
withdrawing from it or trying to protect ourselves from it.

Paradoxically, to face the totality of life we must face the

reality of death, sorrow, and loss as well.  We must face them
as unavoidable aspects of life.  The question is, can we face
them directly without getting lost in the stories that our mind
weaves about them?  Because if we can, we will find a
tremendous affirmation of life, an affirmation that is forged
in the fierce embrace of tragedy.

At the very heart and core of our being, there exists an
overwhelming 'yes' to existence.  This yes is discovered by
those who have the courage to open their hearts to the
totality of life. This yes is found only by
embracing the reality of sorrow and going beyond it. 

Adyashanti

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Vibrate the Cosmos - Saran Kauer

We vibrate on a cellular level, on an emotional level, we
vibrate in our heart beats, we vibrate as we communicate
through our voices.

We live in a vibrational Universe.

Everything that exists in the Universe has an individual
vibratory signature.  Even the planets have their unique
humming sounds as they orbit in space!  So we keep
vibrating and whatever we are a vibrational match with
will easily flow into existence.

What we manifest around us [fear, anger, hatred, love, peace]
is just a reflection of our own point of vibration.

How will you vibrate the Cosmos...

Susan Kauer

~

At its Essence everything is energy.  We are beings of energy -
the Source Energy that reverberates with each molecule,
every cell of the body.  Source Energy animates every living
being.  We thrive when our actions and interactions are
aligned with the energy that animates and sustains
[the Universe].

The energy that we encounter inside ourselves is the same
energy that guides the movement of the heavenly spheres -
the stars, the galaxies, universes.

Each living being has a characteristic profile of energy
frequencies expressed within his or her body.  Our
individual energies pulse in and out of the Sea of all
Energies...

When we tap into that confluence of energy we arise renewed,
knowing that the energies in our bodies are moving with the
harmonies of vast Cosmic Music.  There's nothing you have to
do to earn the presence of the Source Energy, for it is nothing
less than the Essence of who you are.

Joan C. King

From: The Code of Authentic Living

~

Find your resonance with the Celestial Song
in your heart - and know - we are all a tone of
Love playing our uniqueness in the chord of
Life...

MM

~

Photo - Aurora Borealis from a Calendar

The Unknown Self - John O'Donohue

[.....]

It presides within like an evening freedom
That will often see you enchanted by twilight
Without ever recognizing the falling night,...

...It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease
That is not ruffled by disappointment,
It presides in a deeper current of time
Free from the force of cause and sequence
That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,
Its dark light might quench your mind
For it knows how your primeval heart
Sisters every cell of your life
To all your known mind would avoid.

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,
Offering you only discreet glimpses
Of how you construct your life.

At times it will lead you strangely,
Magnetized by some resonance
That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night
As the poet who draws your dreams,
Creating for you many secret doors
Decorated with pictures of your hunger.

It has the dignity of the angelic
That knows you to your roots,
Always awaiting your deeper befriending
To take you beyond the threshold of want,
Where all your diverse strainings
Can come to wholesome ease.

John O'Donohue
Excerpt from "The Unknown Self"
from - Benedictus - A Book of Blessings

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Soul's Secret Signature - C.S. Lewis

...Are not all friendships born at the moment when at last you
meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and
uncertain at best) of that something which you were born
desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all
the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and
day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking
for, watching for, listening for? But you'be never had it...

All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have
been but hints of it - tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite
fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear.
But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came
an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself,
you would know it.

Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say:
"Here at last is the thing I was made for."  We cannot tell each
other about it.  It is the secret signature of each soul, the
incommunicable and unappeasable longing, the thing we
desired before we met our wives [husbands] or made our friends
or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our
deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife [husband] or
friend or work.  While we are, this is.  If we lose this, we lose all.

C.S. Lewis
from: The Problem of Pain

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
[the True Friend] -

and say, sit.  Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

[brackets mine]

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Star Burst Crystal

Survivors of Solitude - John O'Donohue

They are to be admired those survivors
of solitude who have gone with no maps
into the room without features,
where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,
no path of danger to a cold summit
to look back on and feel exuberant,
no clarity of territories yet untouched
that tremble near the human breath,
no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores
to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,
no friendship of other explorers
drawn into the dream of the unknown.

No.  They do not belong to the outside worship
of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior
space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,
where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human
and a poultice of silence pulls every sound
out of circulation down into the ground,
where in the panic of being, each breath unravels
an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind,
shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost...
...and the end of all exploring is the relentless
arrival at an ever novel nowhere.

John O'Donohue
From: Echoes of Memory

Original title - "Nowhere"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Remaining Empty - Thomas Merton

Art by Ann Poucher

The true "contemplative" is not one who prepares his mind
for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but
is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never
 anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light. 
He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation.
He does not demand light instead of darkness.  He waits in
silence, and, when he is "answered," it is not so much by a
word that bursts into his silence.  It is by his silence itself,
suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of
great power, full of the voice of [the Silence].

Thomas Merton
from: The Climate of Monastic Prayer

(one of the last books he prepared for publication)

~

Personal Note: Although I do not consider myself a
"contemplative", as a "Mystic", I have had similar
experience with silence/Silence.  The labels don't
really matter.  It is the "remaining empty" in silence,
listening without agenda, that allows for the "direct
experience" of the Ineffable - aka - the Voice of
The Silence...

Thrive - Leo Hartong

What environment do you thrive in?
Plants need different conditions to thrive in
and when you try to grow it in a different environment -
it can't thrive.

It's not about preferences,
or about "accepting life as it is" -
but knowing what you need for your spirit to thrive.

It is about the recognition of what it truly is
that lives, thinks, sees and breathes
through and as you...
The Essence of your Being
that appears as you.

Leo Hartong
Excerpt from: From Self to Self

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Longing...

The Longing of the Heart is there to draw you in.
It's the Longing for that which is true, pure,
innocent, whole and Alive within you...

It's the Longing for the embrace of the Eternal Being
that animates your being...

It's the call of "The Beloved."

Follow the call...

~

The Longing is your Innocence;
an innocent Longing for
Divine Intimacy;
the Eternal recognizing ItSelf in you...

~

It is the Self calling ItSelf back to ItSelf,
like the rhythm of the Ocean pulling the waves
 back to Itself from the shore;
reclaiming ItSelf...

Let your innocent Longing carry you to
your Eternal Being within...
Thrive in the depths of Its Stillness there...

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
c. 2004-2006

~

Photo/Art - Mystic Meandering