Look deep

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. ~Albert Einstein

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New conversations

We are not talking about passive agents of transformation;
we are talking about an intelligence,
a consciousness, an alive and other mind, a spirit. . .
Nature is alive and is talking to us.
This is not a metaphor. ~Terrence McKenna

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Dots

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. ~Steve Jobs

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An Extraordinary Traveller

It’s human nature to avoid the emotional roadblocks that pepper the path to spiritual maturity, to seek instead the slow and steady pace of the ordinary traveller. Yet reaching higher spiritual ground requires an extraordinary traveller. It demands the kind of sea change that arrives at key junctures and can transport you to a higher level of spiritual functioning. A spiritual initiation—an exceptionally difficult life passage that shakes your foundations and makes you question your purpose—is just this sort of sea change. It’s an opportunity disguised as loss; a chance to strengthen the thread of awareness that connects the outer part of your being to the inner, to descend deeper into the soul.

. . . A spiritual initiation refines and reshapes you, allowing you to reinvent yourself completely, to give yourself over to something greater. They are windows through which you can glimpse who you really are and what’s possible for you.

An excerpt from a longer article in Yoga Journal by Bo Forbes entitled The Awakening. Read a longer excerpt here.

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Abundance

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet. ~James Oppenheim

When I was visiting family in Southern California, it was raining in Guanajuato. I came home to a carpet of green. The mountains behind my home were filled with sounds of water and birds this morning. It feels nice to walk with Farley there.

When I woke up today, I affirmed that today was going to be a great day and that I would see abundance everywhere. The morning walk with Farley was the first of many confirmations that the Universe is in agreement with the idea of plenitude.

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New laws

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws. ~Antonin Artaud

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Zoltar

Zoltar channels Mary Oliver when he asks:

Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it life?

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Call of Life

Something is birthing now. An awareness is coming to us that is totally fresh, and we’re discovering that we’re living parts of a living Earth. Our sense of self becomes inseperable from the living planet. That’s a shift of mind. That’s an awakening of consciouness.

It’s an ancient sensibility but it’s also a new sensibility. This shift means that human love is now being extended into the whole community of life and that will fundamentally shape who we wiil be as humans.

From the documentary, Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction

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Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

“Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower”
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

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The Meek

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. ~Matthew 5:5

I’ve been looking at this verse in a new light. “Meek” denotes gentleness, humbleness and consideration. The meek are the ones tending the planet and fulfilling our natural role as stewards to the Earth. A role that we’ve all but forgotten.

Folks are speculating what will happen in 2012 as the poles shift. Some believe floods and tectonic calamities will occur. If we were to imagine that the world might change overnight and leave us with no Internet, a barter system instead of symbolic paper (money), and razed transportation routes & communication lines, who would thrive? The people living close to the land. The meek.

More than ever it’s time to plant a garden and tread lightly.

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Limits of Your Longing

“Go to the Limits of Your Longing“
by Rainer Maria Rilke; translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59

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I’ll meet you there

Out beyond the ideas of right-doing or wrong-doing there is a field — I’ll meet you there.  ~Rumi

I heard this quote yesterday when listening to Elizabeth Lesser on TedTalks.  She spoke about “taking the other to lunch“. By other, she refers to someone who has a different belief structure and dialoguing with that person in order to break down preconceptions and stereotypes. Lesser, an activist from the left, spent lunch with an activist from the right. They agreed on ground rules and created a list of questions to ask one another. It made me think who I would want to do this with.

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Wind, Sand and Stars

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it but to enable it.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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New worlds

Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world. ~ Rumi.

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Understanding & Home

Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul.
— John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

More John O’Donohue in one of his last interviews before his death in 2008 on The Inner Landscape of Beauty.

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6 things

Alice to the White Queen:  One can’t believe impossible things!

White Queen to Alice:

I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

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Ten to one

Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.  ~Jane Austen

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On a walk

A listening heart grounds suffering.

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Magdalena

Investing in adolescent girls is precisely the catalyst poor countries need to break intergenerational poverty and to create a better distribution of income. Investing in them is not only fair, it is a smart economic move.

Robert B. Zoellick, President, World Bank

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Handle

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
Shakespeare

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