I would cease to be

 

God

dissolved

my mind - my separation.

I cannot describe now my intimacy with Him.

How dependent is you body's life on water and food and air?

I said to God, "I will always be unless you cease to Be,"

and my Beloved replied, "And I

would cease to Be

if you

died."

~ St. John of the Cross

from Love Poem from God

translation by Daniel Ladinsky

art by Daniel Taylor

beneath the ancient mountains tears

 

~ Tania

with thanks to Barbara @ When I was 69

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

on the nature of awareness

 

~ Rupert Spira

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

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

 

 

 

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