Tuesday, November 12, 2024

losing yourself in love

 
 



 
 
Meditation provides a deeper appreciation 
of the inter-relatedness of all things
 and the part each person plays.
 The simple rules of this game are honesty
 with yourself about where you are in your life
 and learning to listen to hear how it is. 
 
Meditation is a way of listening more deeply,
 so you hear from a deeper space, exactly how it is.
 
 Meditation will help you quiet your mind, 
enhance your ability to be insightful and understanding
 and give you a sense of inner peace.

If you meditate regularly, even when you don’t feel like it, 
you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see
 how your thoughts impose limits on you.
 Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.

When I asked Maharajji how to meditate, he said, 
“Meditate like Christ.” 
I said, “Maharajji, how did Christ meditate?”
 He became very quiet and closed his eyes.
 After a few minutes,
 he had a blissful expression on his face 
and a tear trickled down his cheek. 
He opened his eyes and said, 
“He lost himself in Love.” 
Try the meditation of losing yourself in love…. 
 
 
 
 
~ Ram Dass

 

the weighing




The heart's reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.




~ Jane Hirshfield




Monday, November 11, 2024

on the nature of awareness

 





~ Rupert Spira



Saturday, November 9, 2024

free 'here and now'

 





As long as there is the body and the sense of identity with the body, 
frustration is inevitable. 

All changes in consciousness are due to the "I-am-the-body" idea. 
Divested of this idea, the mind becomes steady. There is pure being, 
free of experiencing anything in particular. 

You are accustomed to dealing with things, physical and mental.
 I am not a thing, nor are you. We are neither matter nor energy,
 neither body nor mind. 

While alive, it [the body] attracts attention and fascinates
 so completely that rarely does one perceive one's real nature.
 It is like seeing the surface of the ocean
 and completely forgetting the immensity beneath.

As long as you take yourself to be a person,
 a body and a mind, 
separate from the stream of life,
 having a will of its own, 
pursuing its own aims, 
you are living merely on the surface, 
and whatever you do will be short-lived 
and of little value.

When you desire and fear, and identify yourself with your feelings, 
you create sorrow and bondage. When you create, with love and wisdom, 
and remain unattached to your creations, 
the result is harmony and peace.

 But whatever be the condition of your mind,
 in what way does it reflect on you?
 It is only your self-identification with your mind
 that makes you happy or unhappy.
 Rebel against your slavery to your mind,
 see your bonds as self-created 
and break the chains of attachment and revulsion.

 Keep in mind your goal of freedom, 
until it dawns on you that you are already free, 
that freedom is not something in the distant future
 to be earned with painful efforts,
 but perennially one's own, to be used! 

Liberation is not an acquisition but a matter of courage, 
the courage to believe that you are free already 
and to act on it.

We are free 'here and now', 
It is only the mind that imagines bondage. 
Once you know your mind and its miraculous powers, 
and remove what poisoned it 
-the idea of a separate and isolated person- 
you just leave it alone to do its work
 among things for which it is well suited. 



~ Excerpts from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's
I AM THAT


trauma: not what you think

 





~ Gabor Mate



Friday, November 8, 2024

listen to my silence









Listen to my silence
that murmurs through these leaves
listen to this unwritten song.
.
Much is heaped between these lines
risen without mouth
silted up in the underground.
.
Listen to my paper-thin silence
that is gone with the wind
through the trees.
.
Hear my voice
at the curve of your mouth
earthlydark.
.



~ Jos Steegstra
photo by Michael Kenna

.

stretch out








Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.

Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You. 




~ Hafiz


see no stranger

 
 
 

 


See no stranger has become a practice that defines my relationships. . . .
 
 Seeing no stranger begins in wonder. 
It is to look upon the face of anyone and choose to say: 
You are a part of me I do not yet know. 
Wonder is the wellspring for love. 
 
Who we wonder about determines whose stories we hear 
and whose joy and pain we share. Those we grieve with,
 those we sit with and weep with, are ultimately those we organize
 with and advocate for. 
 
When a critical mass of people come together to wonder about one another,
 grieve with one another, and fight with and for one another, we begin to build
 the solidarity needed for collective liberation and transformation
—a solidarity rooted in love. . . .

Out in the world, I notice the unconscious biases that arise in me
 when I look at faces on the street or in the news. 
To practice seeing each of them as a sister or brother or family member, 
I say in my mind: You are a part of me I do not yet know. 
 
Through conscious repetition, I am practicing orienting to the world
 with wonder and preparing myself for the possibility of connection.
 (Sometimes I do this with animals and the earth, too!) 
 
It opens me up to pay attention to their story. When their story is painful, 
I make excuses to turn back—“It’s too overwhelming” or “It’s not my place”
—but I hold the compass and remember that all I need to do is be present
 to their pain and find a way to grieve with them. 
If I can sit with their pain, I begin to ask:

What do they need?
 
 

 
Valarie Kaur
 Australian aboriginal art
 
 
 

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

to spareness


.


You lean toward nonexistence,
but have not yet become it entirely.
For this reason, you can still be praised.

The tree unleafing enters your dominion.
An early snowfall shows you abide in all things.

Your two dimensions are line and inclination.
Therefore desire,
though is incinders each mote of its object, itself is spare.

The late paintings of Turner
prove your slender depths without limit.
The beauty too of shakuhachi and cello.

"Winter darkness. Rain. No crickets singing."
-You are there, pulling hard on the rope-end.

Remembering you, I remember also compassion.
I cannot explain this.
Nor how you live in a teabowl
or in a stone that has spent a long time in a river.
Nor the way you at times can signal your own contradiction,
meaning extra, but not by much-
"Brother, can you spare a dime," one thin man asks another.

Any room, however cluttered, gestures toward you,
declaring:
"Here lives this, not that."
In mathematics, the modest "<" sign gestures toward you.

Your season is surely November,
your fruit, persimmons ripening by coldness.

Your sound a crow cry, a bus idling at night by roadside.

Without apparent effect,
and so you remind of starlight on the colors of a cow's hide.

Your proposition, like you, is simple, of interest only to the human soul:
vast reach of all that is not, and still something is.




~ Jane Hirshfield



i am






i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)



~ e.e.cummings
.from E. E. Commings:Selected Poems

 

adrift


.


Let my dreams while I'm wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, baptized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, winter, spring,
summer. Leaves over head, under foot.
Waves arrive, buffets from friends
offended, enemies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I'm in.




~ William Stafford

carry my dreams

 





small horses ride me
carry my dreams
of prairies and frontiers
where once
the first people roamed
claimed union with the earth
no right to own or possess
no sense of territory
all boundaries
placed by unseen ones
here I will give you thunder
shatter your hearts with rain
let snow soothe you
make your healing water
clear sweet
a sacred spring
where the thirsty
may drink
animals all




~ Bell Hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins)
 Appalachian Elegy #5
art by Harrison Begay



a blessing

 




~ The Blessing - Aotearoa - 
New Zealand Churches join to sing "The Blessing"

with thanks to Love is a place


Sunday, November 3, 2024

before the mind gives us perception; name, form, comparison, is awareness

 




 As you realize yourself in manifestation,
 you keep on discovering that you are ever more 
than what you have imagined. 

Consciousness as such is the subtle counterpart of matter. 
Just as inertia and energy are attributes of matter, 
so does harmony manifest itself as consciousness.
 You may consider it in a way as a form of very subtle energy.
 Wherever matter organizes itself into a stable organism, 
consciousness appears spontaneously.
 With the destruction of the organism,
 consciousness disappears.

The mind produces thoughts ceaselessly, 
even when you do not look at them. 
When you know what is going on in your mind,
 you call it consciousness. 

This is your waking state - your consciousness shifts 
from sensation to sensation, from perception to perception, 
from idea to idea, in endless succession. 

Then comes awareness, 
the direct insight into the whole of consciousness,
 the totality of the mind. 
The mind is like a river,
 flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body; 
you identify yourself for a moment 
with some particular ripple and call it "my thought". 
All you are conscious of is your mind;
 awareness is the cognizance of consciousness
 as a whole.

Consciousness comes and goes,
 awareness shines immutably. 

When there is a person, there is also consciousness.
 "I am", mind, consciousness denote the same state.
 If you say "I am aware", it only means 
"I am conscious of thinking about being aware".

 There is no "I am" in awareness. 
Witnessing is of the mind.
 The witness goes with the witnessed. 
In the state of non-duality,
 all separation ceases. 

It [the witness] is both [real and unreal]. 
The last remnant of illusion,
 the first touch of the real. To say: 
"I am only the witness"
 is both false and true: 
false because of the "I am", 
true because of the witness. 

It is better to say "there is witnessing". 
The moment you say "I am", 
the entire universe comes into being 
along with its creator. 

The witness is merely a point in awareness. 
It has no name and form. 





~ excerpts from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's
I AM THAT
art by Baje Whitethorn, Sr 
Navajo artist



Saturday, November 2, 2024

How long does it take to make the woods?









How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.





~ Wendell Berry
 from A Timbered Choir

the clay jug




...
Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains,
and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!

All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.

And the music from the stirings that no one touches, and the
source of all water.
...
It you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:
Friend, listen:  the God whom I love is inside.
...


~ Kabir



mother earth

 





The soul of a culture cannot evolve if the body is not reclaimed and honoured.

 In Navajo mythology, Changing Woman is the creatix. 
She is earth and sky, the Lady of the Plants, and of the Sea.
 She goes beyond the bearer aspect of the mother; 
she is the feminine creator.

Her cosmic cyclic movements-aging each Winter 
and becoming a young beautiful maiden each Spring
-make Her the essence of death and rebirth 
signature of the continual restoration and rejuvenation of Life. 

 This ability to move with the creative impulse 
without trying to force it is an aspect of the feminine. 
There is a quality of the feminine that allows 
things to happen in the natural cycle of things. 




~ from The Heroine's Journey
by Maureen Murdock
art: Navajo sand painting of Mother Earth
by Marie Akee





what you are given




.



You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after. 
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, 
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table. 
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity, 
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus—slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life—
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire? 
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, 
we become our choices.
Each yes, each one continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness. 
The anvil leans into its silence. 
The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?




~ Jane Hirshfield
from Given Sugar, Given Salt
art by Vic Muniz

pain and healing








And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:

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

so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, 

your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, 

even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen,
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, 

has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened 
with His own sacred tears.



~ Kahlil Gibran
from The Prophet
 art by Sean Lewis

Friday, November 1, 2024

the nature of thoughts

 





Rupert Spira