without an image of ourselves

Procrustes was a host who adjusted his guests to their bed.
Procrustes, whose name means "he who stretches."

He kept a house by the side of the road where he offered hospitality to passing strangers, who were invited in for a pleasant meal and a night's rest in his very special bed. Procrustes described it as having the unique property that its length exactly matched whomsoever lay down upon it. What Procrustes didn't volunteer was the method by which this "one-size-fits-all" was achieved, namely as soon as the guest lay down Procrustes went to work upon him, stretching him on the rack if he was too short for the bed and chopping off his legs if he was too long. Theseus turned the tables on Procrustes, fatally adjusting him to fit his own bed.


We are no sooner out of the womb than we must begin this 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

our compulsive manufacturing of contrived existence stops

 

There are times like these in our lives—such as facing death or even giving birth —

when we are no longer able to manage our outer image, no longer able to suspend ourselves

 in pursuit of the ideal self. It’s just how it is—we’re only human beings, and in these times

 of crisis we just don’t have the energy to hold it all together. When things fall apart,

 we can only be as we are. Pretense and striving fall away, and life becomes starkly simple.

 

 The value of such moments is this: we are shown that the game can be given up 

and that when it is, the emptiness that we feared, emptiness of the void, is not what is there.

 What is there is the bare fact of being. Simple presence remains—breathing in and out, 

waking up and going to sleep. The inevitability of the circumstances at hand is 

compelling enough that for the moment, our complexity ceases. Our compulsive manufacturing

 of contrived existence stops. Perhaps in that ungrounded space, we are not even comforting ourselves,

 not even telling ourselves everything is okay; we may be too tired to do even that. 

It’s just total capitulation—we’re forced into non-grasping of inherent reality. 

The contrived self has been emptied out along with contrived existence and the tiring treadmill

 of image maintenance that goes along with it. What remains is a new moment 

spontaneously meeting us again and again.

There is an incredible reality that opens up to us in those gaps 

if we just do not reject rupture. In fact, if we have some reliable idea of what is happening

 in that intermediate, groundless space, rupture can become rapture.

 

 

 

 

~  Pema Khandro Rinpoche

excerpts from Breaking Open in the Bardo

defending the image

 humility is the greatest freedom. 

 

As long as you have to defend the imaginary self

 that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.

 

As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people,

 you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and

 there is no joy in things that do not exist.

~Thomas Merton

 

it floats you

 

The vast flood

Rolls onward

But yield yourself,

And it floats you upon it.

~ Ikkyu

from Zen and Zen Classics 

by R. H. Blyth

with thanks to Poetry-Chaikhana.com

contemplative dimensions of healing trauma

 

~ James Finley

breathing underwater

 

I built my house by the sea.

Not on the sands, mind you;

not on the shifting sand.

And I built it of rock.

A strong house

by a strong sea.

And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.

Good neighbours.

Not that we spoke much.

We met in silences.

Respectful, keeping our distance,

but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.

Always the fence of sand our barrier,

always, the sand between.

And then one day,

- and still I don't know how it happened -

the sea came.

Without warning.

Without welcome, even.

Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine,

less like the flow of water than the flow of blood.

Slow, but coming.

Slow, but flowing like an open wound.

And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of death.

A while I thought the sea crept higher, till it reached my door.

And I knew then, there was nether flight, nor death, nor drowning.

That when the sea comes calling you stop being neighbours

and you give your house for a coral castle,

and you learn to breathe underwater.

~ Carol Bieleck

"I am not a traditional nun. 

In addition to being a Sister of the Society of the Sacred Heart,

 I became an ordained Sufi priest,

 participated in the Dances of Universal Peace,

 and attended the 1995 United Nations Women’s Conference in Bejiing."

photo by Alex Mustard

a great coauthorship

 

Each of us has had many authors, 

and each of us is engaged, 

for better or worse, in that same authorship. 

We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship 

in which we are collaborating with God and nature

 in the making of ourselves and one another. 

From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly,

 or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate

 is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product.

The business of humanity is undoubtedly survival in this complex sense —

 a necessary, difficult, and entirely fascinating job of work. We have in us

 deeply planted instructions — personal, cultural, and natural — to survive, 

and we do not need much experience to inform us that we cannot survive alone. 

The smallest possible “survival unit,” indeed, appears to be the universe… 

Inside it, everything happens in concert; not a breath is drawn but by the grace

 of an inconceivable series of vital connections joining an inconceivable multiplicity

 of created things in an inconceivable unity. 

it may be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods,

 and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites 

by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe… 

They give the word “love” its only chance to mean, 

for only they can give it a history,

 a community, and a place. 

 in such ways can love become flesh

 and do its worldly work.

It is  in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth;

 it is to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us

 that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are… 

Separate from the relationships,

 there is nobody to be known.

~ Wendell Berry

taken from  The Art of the Commonplace

art: Share in the wonder of the Shared Sky exhibition | by Stuart Buchanan

with thanks to The Marginalian by Maria Popova

let the last thing be song

 

i.

Memory is safest in someone with amnesia.

Behind locked doors

glow the unmarred pieces—

musical notes humming

in a jumble, only

waiting to be

arranged.

ii.

What is left in one

who does not remember?

Love and music.

Not a name but the fullness.

Not the sequence of events

but order of rhythm and pitch,

a piece of time in which to exist.

iii.

A tone traveling through space has no referent,

and yet we infer, and yet it

finds its way between our cells

and shakes us.

Aren’t we all still quivering

like tuning forks

with the shock of being,

the shock of being seen?

iv.

When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.

Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe,

with its loosening warp

and weft, still

unspool its symphony?

Sing to me — please —

and I will sing for you as all unravels,

as time continues past the final beat

of the stutter inside your chest.

Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,

with the black hole’s

fathomless B-flat.

~ Hannah Fries

with thanks to the marginalian

there is some kiss

There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Ocean water begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask the moon to come and press its

face against mine, Breathe into me, Close the language-door and 

open the love-window. The moon won't use the door, only the window.

~ Rumi 

half spirit and half animal

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. 

As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. 
This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object,
 their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, 
for to be in time, means to change. 

~  C. S. Lewis

from The Screwtape Letters

happy birthday!!

 

Happy 89th Birthday to Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

dealing with pain associated with causes and conditions in the past

 

~ Gabor Mate

a community of the spirit

 

There is a community of the spirit.

Join it, and feel the delight

of walking in the noisy street

and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,

and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes

to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,

if you want to be held.

Sit down in the circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel

the shepherd’s love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.

Don’t accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.

Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.

You moan, “She left me.” “He left me.”

Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.

Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison

when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.

Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always

widening rings of being.

~ Rumi

 from Selected Poems 

Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

the river of silence

 

You would know the secret of death.

 But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

 The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day 

cannot unveil the mystery of light. 

If you would indeed behold the spirit of death,

open your heart wide unto the body of life.

 For life and death are one, 

even as the river and the sea are one.

In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond; 

And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.

 Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity. 

Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd 

when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.

 Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, 

that he shall wear the mark of the king?

Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? 

And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath

 from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand

 and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. 

And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. 

And when the earth shall claim your limbs,

 then shall you truly dance.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

in the midst of constant change - we are not "selves"

 

But just why is everything impermanent and in constant change? 

The answer has to do with what might be called 

the flip-side of anicca: pratityasamutpada, 

or, technically, “interdependent origination.”

More simply: everything changes because everything is interrelated.

 Everything comes into being 

and continues in being 

through and with something else.

Nothing, Buddha came to see, has its own existence.

In fact, when he wanted to describe the human self, 

or the self/identity of anything,

 the term he used was anatta,

 which means literally no-self. 

We are not “selves” in the sense of individual, 

separate, independent “things.”

 Rather, we are constantly changing

 because we are constantly interrelating.

~ Paul F. Knitter

Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture

 at Union Theological Seminary in New York

with thanks to love is a place