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

you cannot have your cake and eat it

 

~ Rupert Spira

behind our billboard - nobody being somebody

 

~ Ram Dass

surpass yourself

The pilgrim sees no form but His and knows
That He subsists beneath all passing shows --

The pilgrim comes from Him whom he can see,
Lives in Him, with Him, and beyond all three.

Be lost in Unity's inclusive span,
Or you are human but not yet a man.

Whoever lives, the wicked and the blessed,
Contains a hidden sun within his breast --

Its light must dawn though dogged by long delay;
The clouds that veil it must be torn away --

Whoever reaches to his hidden sun
Surpasses good and bad and knows the One.

The good and bad are here while you are here;
Surpass yourself and they will disappear.

 ~ Farid Attar

English version by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis

fear - disappearing and becomming

 

It is said that before entering the sea

A river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has travelled,

from the peaks of the mountains, 

the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,

 she sees an ocean so vast,

 that to enter

 there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.

The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.

To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk 

of entering the ocean 

because only then will fear disappear 

because that’s where the river will know 

it’s not about disappearing

 into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.

~ Kahlil Gibran

image by Timisu