and all this glory burning hot.
there’s this holy hushing
songs of angels,
a chorus of bluebells
bowing heads
softly clapping
as they watch it all approaching.
there’s this first blush of light,
smudging darkness,
a bit like the bitter and sweet
mixed each day with our longing
for joy to come nest.
there’s a song playing on low
sometimes you forget to remember
be still and know
as sure as spring follows winter
love always wins
listen to your heartbeat
joy is our birthright
right now
morning has come
🌞
Amy Lloyd (AL)
It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
Yes!
-William Stafford
At times, our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
I wonder if I would have jumped or gone back to die
If I had really known how hard it would be
On and on
Do I really believe it will ever get better?
No answer comes
I move away from the question
I made my choice
I go curl up
In the Legacy Garden
On the round plaque with Wendell Berry’s words of understanding
I part the out thrusting branches
And come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
There is singing around me.
Though I am dark
There is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
There is flight around me.
– Wendell Berry
Underneath the gondola’s painted ever-green leaves –
I wish there was a raven
Who cares if people see me?
🌑
AL – 12/3/12
I fell down,
Broken
Down beneath the curtain of a world that wasn’t mine
I fell down,
Hurting
Down under the pressure of a life I couldn’t find
Watching
Others
There were times that I felt nothing but the pain of being me
Watching
Wondering
Why and how and when would I be able to be free
I tried
Hiding
Nothing kept the darkness from surrounding me with grief
I tried
Crying
But nothing kept the demons that were haunting me
The fear
The aching
The desperation etched upon my heart in every beat
The scars
Appearing
Like a chain around my soul, stealing all I used to be
I sought comfort
I sought courage
I sought loving in the hands of those that only caused me pain
I sought refuge
I sought freedom
I sought counsel in the places that left me filled with guilt and shame
I fell down,
Broken
Down beneath the curtain of a world that wasn’t mine
I fell down,
Hurting
Down under the pressure of a life I couldn’t find
Then it came
The flicker
Of hope and understanding that I could be alive again
Then it came
A glimmer
The ember of the flame inside my heart began to shine
Watching
Others
I looked inside their minds and saw that I was not the only one
Watching
Wondering
How I could share the message that all of us are one
I tried
Learning
Taking all the knowledge that the world gave unto me
I tried
Doing
And realized the healing came from giving all I had to give
The love
Replaced fear
My heart beats now for others and keeps me going on and on
The scars
On show now
Proving that with courage our soul can set us free
I give comfort
I give courage
I give loving to the ones of those that are only feeling pain
I give refuge
I give freedom
I give counsel to those needing me with kindness, without blame
I fell down
Humble
Down to show my gratitude for living life this way
I fell down
Thankful
Vowing to show others life is better every day
💔🔥❤️
Register for Free Membership and receive complimentary training, guides and audio’s to help you on your Journey as A Woman On Purpose – Empowered – Enlightened – Evolved
On Dec 3, 2014 (2 year anniversary of my living death in the dark night of the soul, I got a post titled Love never Dies from Jen Lemen at Hopeful World http://hopefulworld.org
Here’s a taste of what it said:
I am struck also as I write to you from this wintery desk, that building our capacity for stillness helps so much when the wild comes to our restless souls. Without that practice of being quiet, it’s easy to be scared when our wild, instinctual thoughts pop up. It’s easy to think that they are bad somehow or in need of corralling. But the practice of quiet and stillness helps us recognize our instinctual knowing for what it is: a call to our most true nature. A call to a kind of expression that is more vibrant, more textured, more passionate, more alive–even if it’s a little bit messy. Even if it kicks up a little bit of shame that we are this human, this raw.
So I invite you today to sit with me for three magic minutes. I’ll be right here with you, my own mind a rollercoaster of crazy, of frantic, of nonsensical worrisome things. I’ll sit with you and notice everything in my own soul, while you notice everything in yours and together we will begin to knit together an understanding of what’s underneath that noise: a gorgeous, exquisite tapestry of human longing designed to carry us to an awake magnificent place.
Will you join me?
Setting the timer now.
Let me know how it is on the other side.
With so much love,
Jen
It’s now 3.5 years later and Jen Lemen is still bringing all that, and more to me, to you, to the shaky, hoping world, to the edges of eternity…love never dies.
Today, in this crazy, brutal brutal place, where we ask…
how can these two people be our Presidential choices?
how can people keep killing other people?
how can I deal with the grief and the fear of this?
how can I help?
what is the solution?
what is my part?
Jen Lemen is doing her part. She’s offering Soul Snacks – http://www.thewayofdevotion.org/soul-snacks
Amazing gifts to all of of struggling, hungry, hurting, angry, frustrated pilgrims and poets.
Right now she has open enrollment and I have just this…
Don’t wait! http://www.thewayofdevotion.org/soul-snacks
Gobble this up, savor it a bite at a time, eat them from start to finish, or nibble from the middle to each edge of crust. Savory, delectable soul-spices involving all your most subtle senses. http://www.thewayofdevotion.org/soul-snacks
I
💞
Keep wrestling, burn, scream, let go, melt, let your heart keep breaking for the sake of your heart, keep saying the names of your people, fiercely defend your tenderness, think, grieve, repair, renew, continue to do what’s in your heart to do…each thread matters…each color makes the world more beautiful…
in the end, only love is eternal, only love remains… http://www.thewayofdevotion.org/soul-snacks
🔥
AL
We are God’s thread
weaving through the tapestry,
the masterpiece is slowly
created.
Potential for beauty, we can’t know,
unfolding,
becoming,
revealing glory
so bright
it makes the sun squint
and reach for sunglasses.
Brilliance so far beyond ourselves
we go shining into the gray
as we open to the new jewels appearing,
sparkling in the moonlight.
As we step into the needle’s eye
the angels catch their breath,
cheering our blazing garments,
dazzled by the vision
God is revealing through the creation.
As we surrender to the greatest mystery,
the beauty we inhabit
becomes us,
walking in humble clay
eyes out shining the stars
set in the heavens.
Until we totally disappear and all that’s left
is holiness
so pure
all we can do
is
bow in wonder
at ourselves
and give thanks
as the silk thread
becomes liquid gold and silver
pure and simple
glory
as we realize our place in the whole.
We are the temple of our creator.
The home of God.
😎
AL
As deftly and finally as one pulls out a thread
someone is weaving them, gracefully tying them,
minute and irreversible.
In the towering sky, even under the fortress,
root tendrils muscle in and bind ligaments
through an abyss we had been told was absolute.
No enormity of terror
can keep up
with the steady, unseen healing.
Before the assault, the horrible wound,
gaping and exposed,
the stitching has already begun.
Even as we sigh in our own world,
moving on, separate,
we are being sewn in.
In the earthquake, the collapsing mountains,
not a bit of rubble falls
on the path from the temple.
If you could hold your immortal soul
in your hands, you would hardly recognize it
from one moment to the next.
Your grave is already empty.
__________________
Better to live your life open rather than exist on borrowed time, waiting for the great unmasking.
– Kate Jacobs
love is the flame
all people yearn for the flame
some people never discover there actually is a flame
some people ignore the flame
some people avoid the flame
some people examine the flame
some people research the flame
some people control the flame
some people fear the flame
some people are fooled by fake flame
some people admire the flame
some people use the flame
some people walk on the flame
some people dance with the flame
some people dance in the flame
some people become the flame
some people are consumed by the flame
your choice…
how will you burn?
🔥
AL
Those who are drawn to the root of love are mystics. Mystics are not satisfied with the surface patterns of love, with the emotional tangles and insecurities of human loving. They seek a purer wine, a more potent passion. They need the essence of love, its divine substance.
~ Irina Tweedie
On the day I died
water ran through pipes,
footsteps identified people in the house and
the dogs nails clicked quickly on the wood floors above my head,
insisting it was time to go out for relief.
I still needed coffee,
light with cream,
2 sugars.
The sun was bright
and I remember the sky was that deep blue,
romantically named, azurite.
There was cockscomb,
half alive in pots near the wooden footbridge I walked over.
I used to love them when I was alive.
I touched their red, velvety, blooms seeking to feel something.
I mistook fluttering angel wings for birds,
battles fought,
just beyond where I lay
on the words of Wendell Berry –
the only thread
keeping me tethered to this world.
I sat on benches beside ghosts
of those who had gone before me.
I could still only feel them beside me,
I was in the world between worlds.
There was darkness, a fire swamp, screaming, clashes of swords,
I could not save myself.
God was everywhere.
I found myself in a boat,
where I stayed for 2 years, until,
in recent weeks,
the call came to step out,
to start walking on water.
Late in the day,
I stood in the bathroom,
accepting the most insulting job offer I have ever received,
then sat on a stool,
trying to act as if I was alive,
pretending to look for puzzle pieces,
slightly aware of the colors and shapes,
singing echoes of songs I used to love,
with my beautiful Robin,
who seemed very much alive.
🔥
AL
In Memoriam of my death, consumed by the flame,
December 3, 2012 –
may I be remembered as
Daniel J O’Connell having the:
Spirit of a warrior
Soul of a poet
Irradiat your mind with the light from within, allow your existence to move along within the unbroken continuity of nature. The ideal of authenticity lies deep in the heart of one’s union to the world not the possession of it. The grandeur of unity holds a definitive place in the infinite. When you calibrate your spirit with that of the world you are left open to respond to your life harmoniously with the universe. Unmask your illusions from those artificial ideas you have build your lives upon with walls and boundaries solidifying your thoughts about a tragic disassociation to nature. It’s up to you to be open now or wait for the great unmasking…the choice is yours but unmasking now allows you to reconcile your existence while you still have the chance to live it.
– Lissette T. Hesmadt
We have known and have believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them. 1 John 4:16
No matter the results and outcomes,
the thousand possibilities,
you are here now.
Why even try to trace
what the beggar will do with your money?
Let your giving be the whole horizon.
Be lovingly present
and wars and stars and grief and cats alike
will be unable to trouble you.
At the center of the world and in each breath
this is the holy temple, the birthing moment:
giving and receiving love. That is all.
This is the sacred point,
the love in you
meeting the love in the world.
However broken or weary you are,
LIGHT AND DARKNESS
When we are touched by the presence of sacred wonder, we do not suddenly run away from the darkness and pretend that it does not exist. Nor do we try to explain away the darkness or become lost in angst over questioning how such darkness can possibly exist. Rather, seeing the greater divine light even a little, we start to see how our delusions only cause ourselves and others such suffering. This growing realization can then begin to slowly open our hearts to compassion and love, both for ourselves and for all other beings who toil in the darkness, caught in cycles of pain, fear, and ignorance. From this love also comes a growing commitment to fight the delusions and the darkness and to serve the light however we can. Indeed, each one of us can fight the darkness in our own ways and in our own time.
First, we can begin to fight our own delusions and grow spiritually as best we can. We can work toward our own awakening and strive to gain our own growing clarity of vision that allows us to see more and more the delusions for what they are and to see, beyond the delusions, the boundless preciousness of all life, including our own. We cannot truly begin to help others and the world until we begin to clear the clouds from our own eyes. And to do this, we need to start cultivating an open heart of loving-kindness for all life. The true end of suffering comes with the dawning of a deep wisdom that sees the transient, impermanent veneer, but also sees the very present and real luminous spiritual reality that flows through all of us. This requires a commitment to fight first our own intolerance, cruelty, arrogance, anger, and hatred. Change must start in our own hearts and minds and must start with exercising kindness towards ourselves and to those around us in our daily lives.
Second, we can work to not add to the darkness in our own corner of the world and work instead to shed whatever light we can, even if it is only in the small interactions with others in our daily lives. Our everyday interactions, no matter how humble, can call forth the divine light into our own lives and those around us, when we act with a kind and loving intention. It is certainly wonderful when good people affect positive change on a community wide or larger basis in society. Such efforts need to be supported and commended. But not all of us are always in a position to affect larger societal change. This does not stop us,however, from working quietly in our small corner of the world, bringing light to our own lives and bringing some light to those around us. Such efforts are not to be put down, but have infinite significance. Even a few lights in a darkened city shed beauty and wonder.
Indeed, the light of love, no matter how small, makes a difference, and the world will be healed only when all of the small corners are filled with light and love. And that will happen only when each of us makes that effort where we stand in the moment in our daily lives.
⚡️
Steven Jay
m.facebook.com at simpleinnertruths
on the edge of flying.
the verge of breaking through
standing in the pouring rain
hoping to find you,
somewhere in the darkness
of this dark and stormy night,
questions with no answers
colliding with the light.
bloody battles all around,
I’m caught within my pain.
holding on to faith in something
in the middle of this fight.
at the end of living
not knowing what to do,
tears, they match the weather
flooding from my soul.
I shake my head for clearing,
prepare my heart to fight,
struggle to my aching feet
step into the ring of light.
death lies all around me,
as I pray this simple prayer,
release me for a moment,
there’s work for me to do.
⚡️
AL
For the dulness that encloses me I pray
your grace burn off the morning fog.
That the dream of doubt I wear like clothes
I pray may in your light dissolve, and fall away.
For healing of the wound that is a world that is a wall
Like the painting’s fifth cow, who looks out directly, straight toward you, from inside her black and white spots.
An extra day —
Accidental, surely: the made calendar stumbling over the real as a drunk trips over a threshold too low to see.
An extra day —
With a second cup of black coffee. A friendly but businesslike phone call. A mailed-back package. Some extra work, but not too much — just one day’s worth, exactly.
An extra day —
Not unlike the space between a door and its frame when one room is lit and another is not, and one changes into the other as a woman exchanges a scarf.
An extra day —
Extraordinarily like any other. And still there is some generosity to it, like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.
life: acoustic & amplified 