Sunday, March 31, 2024

when in doubt

 








When in doubt,
Wear faux leopard.

When in doubt,
Err on the side of generosity.

When in doubt,
Greet everyone as you would the Buddha.

When in doubt,
Collect blessings from those who own nothing.

When in doubt,
Absorb biographies to avoid life’s major mistakes.

When in doubt,
Make life’s major mistakes.

When in doubt,
Pay attention to the vendor shouting ‘Diooooos,’
Even when you find out he was only shouting, ‘Gaaaaas.’

When in doubt,
Carry a handkerchief and a fan.

When in doubt,
Thank everyone. Twice.

When in doubt,
Heed the clouds.

When in doubt,
Sleep on it.

When in doubt,
Treat all sentient and insentient beings as kin.

When in doubt,
Forgive us our myopia
As we forgive those who are myopic against us.

When in doubt,
Unreel your grief to a tree.

When in doubt,
Remember this.
We are all on a
Caucus-race.

There is no start.
No finish.
Everyone wins.




~ Sandra Cisneros
from  Woman Without Shame



optimism






More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.
 
 

~ Jane Hirshfield 
 
 
 

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

languages we have yet to learn







Mycorrhizal fungi form partnerships with plant roots. 
These partnerships connect neighboring plants 
through extensive networks in the soil. 

Much like social networks or neural networks,
 the fungal mycelia of mycorrhizas allow signals 
to be sent between trees in a forest. 

These networks are effectively an information highway,
 with recent studies demonstrating the exchange of nutritional resources,
 defence signals and allelochemicals.

New research by computer scientist Andrew Adamatzky
 at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory of the University
 of the West of England, suggests this ancient kingdom
 has an electrical “language” all of its own – far more complicated 
than anyone previously thought. According to the study,
 fungi might even use “words” to form “sentences”
 to communicate with neighbours.

Despite lacking a nervous system, fungi seem to transmit
 information using electrical impulses across
 thread-like filaments called hyphae. 
The filaments form a thin web called a mycelium 
that links fungal colonies within the soil. These networks
 are remarkably similar to animal nervous systems.
 By measuring the frequency and intensity of the impulses, 
it may be possible to unpick and understand the languages
 used to communicate within and between organisms
 across the kingdoms of life.


~ Amanda Carroll

inhabit the situation you happen to be in now

.




Caretake this moment.
Immerse yourself in its particulars.
Respond to this person, 
this challenge, this deed.

Quit the evasions.
Stop giving yourself needless trouble.
It is time to really live; to fully inhabit 
the situation you happen to be in now.
You are not some disinterested bystander.
Exert yourself.

Respect your partnership with providence.
Ask yourself often, How may I
 perform this particular deed
such that it would be consistent with
 and acceptable to the divine will?
Heed the answer and get to work.

When your doors are shut 
and your room is dark you are not alone.
The will of nature is within you 
as your natural genius is within.
Listen to its importunings.
Follow its directives.

As concerns the art of living, 
the material is your own life.
No great thing is created suddenly.
There must be time.

Give your best and
 always be kind.




~ Epictetus 

Monday, March 25, 2024

a special kind of grace

 






The specific forms that love take in our lives arise and pass in time, 
for this is the way of form. Time is the great dissolver. 
But love itself is that which never comes and goes.

We never know what form love will choose to take in the future, 
for there is no love in the future. Love is only now.
 But it can take a cleansing of perception to see through the veil,
 behind the scenes where love is always at work…
 giving birth to one of its forms, one of its children,
 while recycling and dissolving another.

If we become too fused with a specific form we believe 
we need love to take—a particular person or way 
of finding purpose and meaning—our heart will inevitably
 break when love obliterates that form for something new, 
which it always will. This shattering is the great gift of form,
evidence not of error and mistake,
 but of wholeness and profound compassion.

This dissolution and reorganization is a special kind of grace
 that the conventional mind struggles to know.
 But the heart knows. The body knows.




~ Matt Licata
from A Healing Space
art by Michael Nelson Tjakamarra






known through love but not through thought







Bright but hidden, the Self dwells in the heart.
Everything that moves, breathes, opens, and closes
Lives in the Self.  He is the source of love
And may be known through love but not through thought.
He is the goal of life.  Attain this goal!

...
In his robe are woven heaven and earth,
Mind and body.  Realize him as the One
Behind the many and stop all vain talk.
He is the bridge from death to deathless life.

Where all the nerves meet like spokes in a wheel,
There he dwells, the One behind the many.
Meditate upon him in the mantram.
May he guide us from death to deathless life!

...
The Lord of Love is before and behind.
He extends to the right and to the left.
He extends above; he extends below.
There is no one here but the Lord of Love.
He alone is; in truth, he alone is.



~ excerpt from The Mundaka Upanishad
translated by Eknath Easwaran
art by Jeff Metal


Saturday, March 23, 2024

the simple joy

 





The time of judging
Who is drunk or sober,
Who is right and who is wrong
Who is closer to god, and who is farther away
All that is over

This caravan is led instead by a great delight,
The simple joy that sits with us now

That is the grace





~ Hafiz


Friday, March 22, 2024

how unique are humans really?

 



Photo from Air and Science Magazine


Primatologist Frans de Waal has spent his lifetime 
studying the lives of animals, especially our closest cousins, 
the chimpanzees. de Waal has observed their shifting alliances
 and the structure of their political ranks. He has seen bitter conflicts
 break out, only to be mended by peaceful, respected mediators.
 And he has witnessed chimpanzees grieve for, 
and attempt to comfort, their dead and dying.

But one of the most touching reflections in his new book, 
Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves
is the story he tells of a female chimp who didn’t produce enough milk
 to feed her young. When de Waal taught her to feed her baby with a bottle
 instead, she repaid him with what most of us would recognize as gratitude
: holding both of de Waal’s hands and whimpering sadly if he tried to leave.

The book explores many stories of animal emotions from across
 the animal kingdom, and it might leave you wondering 
how unique humans really are.

Mama, the matriarch and oldest of the chimpanzee colony
 of the Royal Burgers Zoo in Arnhem, the Netherlands, 
expressed affection towards behavioral biologist Jan van Hooff
 as she gave him her last hug before she died in 2016.
 Credit: Jan A R A M van Hooff



~ Frans de Waal
from Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions 
and What They Tell Us About Ourselves
with thanks to Science Friday





there is a grace approaching









There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

And that is what we sing about.
 
 
 
~ Stephen Levine 
from Breaking the Drought: Visions of Grace
 
 
 

the naked awareness of your self


.





... imagination and reason have taught you all they can 
and now you must learn to be wholly given 
to the simple spiritual awareness of your self and God....

he told his disciples, who were loath to give up his physical presence
 (just as you are loath to give up the speculative reflections of your subtle, clever faculties),
 that for their own good he would withdraw his physical presence from them, 
 He said to them, "It is necessary for you that I go,"
 meaning, "It is necessary  for you 
that I depart physically from you."  

St. Augustine, commenting on these words, says:
 "Were not the form of  his humanity withdrawn from our bodily eyes,
 love for him in his Godhead would never cleave to our spiritual eyes."  
And thus I say to you, at a certain point it is necessary
 to give up discursive meditation and learn to taste something of that deep,
 spiritual experience of God's love.

...  always and ever strive toward the naked awareness of your self, 
and continually offer your being to God as your most precious gift. 
 
 Inasmuch as this awareness really is naked, 
you will at first find it terribly painful to rest in it for any length of time
 because, ... your faculties will find no meat for themselves in it. 
 
 Let them fast awhile from their natural delight in knowing, 
It is well said that man naturally desires to know.  Yet at the same time,
 it is also true that no amount of natural or acquired knowledge 
will bring him to taste the spiritual experience of God,
 for this is a pure gift of grace. 
 
 And so I urge you: go after experience rather than knowledge. 
 On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you,
 but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. 
 
 Knowledge tends to breed conceit,
 but love builds.  
 
Knowledge is full of labor,
but love, full of rest.






~ from The Book of Privy Counseling
written anonymously in the fourteenth century 
art: from Arnhem Land



red brocade







The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he's come from,
where he's headed.
That way, he'll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you'll be
such good friends
you don't care.

Let's go back to that.
Rice?  Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That's the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.




~ Naomi Shihab Nye
from 19 Varieties of Gazelle



lute music

 





The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—


Here at the year’s end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.




~ Kenneth Rexroth
from Sacramental Acts
NASA photo



Wednesday, March 20, 2024

it's whisper can be heard

 




Grace is always present. You imagine it is somewhere high in the sky,
far away, and has to descend. It is really inside you, in your Heart.
Grace is the Self. . . .You are never out of its operation.


-~ Sri Ramana Maharshi


 Grace is a manifestation of the cosmic free will in operation. 
It can alter the course of events in a mysterious manner
 through its own unknown laws, which are superior to
 all natural laws, and can modify the latter by interaction.

It is the most powerful force in the universe.

It descends and acts only when it is invoked 
by total self- surrender. 

It acts from within, because God resides in the Heart
 of all beings. Its whisper can be heard only in a mind
 purified by self-surrender and prayer.

Rationalists laugh at it, and atheists scorn it, but it exists.
 It is a descent of God into the soul’s zone of awareness. 
It is a visitation of force unexpected and unpredictable.
 It is a voice spoken out of cosmic silence - 
It is ‘Cosmic Will which can perform 
authentic miracles under its own laws’.




~ D.C. Desai
 from Divine Grace Through Total Self-Surrender
art:  from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
with thanks to love is a place


till you yourself are a sail








The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally
that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash,
cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort
that might lead to madness. 

Instead you must allow the muddy river
to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness;
you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging
its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into
the realm of the real where subjects and objects act
and rest purely, without utterance.
 
.
The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail,
whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.






~ Annie Dillard
excerpts from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
art by Olivia Maria Chevallier

 
 
 
 

Monday, March 18, 2024

prayer happens

 







Prayer is something that happens to you (Romans 8:26-27), 
much more than anything you privately do.

 It is an allowing of the Big Self 
more than an assertion of the small self.

 Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say,
 “Prayer happened, and I was there”
 more than “I prayed today.” 

All you know is that you are being led, 
being guided, being loved, being used,
 being prayed through—
and you are no longer in the driver’s seat.

God stops being an object of attention
 like any other object in the world,
 and becomes at some level your own “I am.” 
You start knowing through,
 with, and in Somebody Else.

Your little “I Am” becomes “We Are.”

Please trust me on this. 
It might be the most important thing I could tell you.





~ Richard Rohr
from The Naked Now
art by Debra Nangala McDonald
with thanks to love is a place