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24 Jan 2016

shiver me timbers

The most living moment comes

when those who love each other

meet each other’s eyes and

in what flows between them.

❤️

~ Rumi

What if love never feels safe? What if it was never meant to provide you with consistent feelings of comfort, certainty, and security? What if it comes spinning out of the stars offering something much more radical, creative, and transformative than ‘safety’ could ever deliver?
Perhaps it wasn’t safety you were seeking after all, but wholeness and an untamed, erupting sort of aliveness?
No matter how many profound insights you have, how many amazingly powerful awakening experiences you collect, or how convinced you become that you have it all together, you will always be at risk for the beloved to step in and pull the rug out from underneath you. He or she will do whatever it takes to reveal your true nature as open, naked, and outside the realm of the conceptual altogether.
No, it will likely never turn out quite like you thought it would. You can be grateful for that. Perhaps the creative and destructive activity of love will never ask that you ‘transcend’ your vulnerability, cover over your sensitivity, ‘heal’ your tenderness, or wiggle into some pre-conditioned, second-hand ‘state’ of ‘high’ vibration. But rather to give everything in service of the most radical vow of all: to remain embodied to and intimate with the full-spectrum explosion of what it means to be an alive human being in a world that has forgotten.
Perhaps love will always seed your world with the emissaries of reorganizing deflation, come to scatter its sacred nectar and fragrances throughout the four directions. Before you turn from this activity and abandon it as an ‘obstacle’ to your path, renew your vow to stay close and to no longer abandon the wildness within you. For this deflation is holy, unbearably creative, and is forming the crystalline substance of the path in every moment.
When you are totally unclothed – of all of your spiritual concepts and certain, safe knowing – love will show you what you are. When the known crumbles away, all that remains is your burning heart. There is nothing more alive than that. There is nothing more sacred than that.

❤️

– Matt Kicata

Posted in attitude, awareness, beauty, Becoming Yourself, commitment, connection, courage, find art at pinterest, Letting Go, Life, Love, Relationships, soul and spirit, Trust, truth, Uncategorized, Vulnerability, www.pinterest.com | Leave a comment

22 Jan 2016

everyday hero

Quote of the Day: Virtue
Next to the seven deadly sins, the seven cardinal virtues are apt to look pale and unenterprising, but appearances are notoriously untrustworthy.
Prudence and temperance, taken separately, may not be apt to get you to your feet cheering, but when they go together, as they almost always do, that’s a different matter. The chain smoker or the junkie, for instance, who exemplifies both by managing to kick the habit, can very well have you throwing your hat in the air, especially if it happens to be somebody whom for personal reasons you’d like to have around a few years longer. And the courage involved isn’t likely to leave you cold either. Often it’s the habit kicker’s variety that seems the most courageous.
If you think of justice as sitting blindfolded with a scale in her hand, you may have to stifle a yawn, but if you think of a black judge acquitting a white racist of a false murder charge, it can give you gooseflesh.
The faith of a child taking your hand in the night is as moving as the faith of Mother Teresa among the untouchables, or Bernadette facing the skeptics at Lourdes, or Abraham, age seventy-five, packing up his bags for the Promised Land. And hope is the glimmer on the horizon that keeps faith plugging forward, of course, the wings that keep it more or less in the air.
Maybe it’s only love that turns things around and makes the seven deadly sins be the ones to look pale and unenterprising for a change. Greed, gluttony, lust, envy, and pride are no more than sad efforts to fill the empty place where love belongs, and anger and sloth just two things that may happen when you find that not even all seven of them at their deadliest ever can.

⚜

~ Frederick Bruechner originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

photos found at http://www.pinterest.com 

Posted in action, attitude, awareness, Becoming Yourself, beloved, Change, Choice, commitment, connection, determination, Dreams, find art at pinterest, forgiveness, Freedom, Growth, Habits, Happiness, healing, Hope, Imagine, Impossible, inspiration, Joy, Letting Go, Life, Love, Miracles, mystery, Passion, Patience, Peace, power | Leave a comment

20 Jan 2016

break away

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

🕊

-Kurt Vonnegut

how little I understand
about life

how small is my vision

how tiny my wings

my experience negligible

my brain so under developed

my travels so limited

even as I attempt to smash the box of my learning

as I fight to open to all good things

as the mystery,

the dream,

gets bigger

my desire to see,

touch,

taste,

handle,

hear,

experience

burns me to the ground

carries me to the sky

fills me with longing

empties me of myself

allows me to be a part of the whole miracle producing she-bang

calls me to be courageous-

a brilliant dancer, even

in spite of my fear,

my limiting inheritance

my illusion of having two left feet

stop thinking so much

just be

just dance

just fly

🕊

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

🎪

― Jiddu Krishnamurtio

photos found at http://www.pinterest.com

Posted in action, Adventure, attitude, awareness, Becoming Yourself, beloved, big, Change, Choice, connection, courage, Dancing, find art at pinterest, Letting Go, Life, Love, Miracles, mystery, Reality | Leave a comment

17 Jan 2016

honored silence

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost

piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table

or somewhere slowly falling

into the brook

to be swallowed by water,

then you have seen beauty

and know it for its transience.

And if you have gone out in the snow

for only the pleasure

of walking barely protected

from the galaxies,

the flakes settling on your parka

like the dust from just-born stars,

the cold waking you

as if from long sleeping,

then you can understand

how, more often than not,

truth is found in silence,

how the natural world comes to you

if you go out to meet it,

its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,

its vacant birdhouses, and dens

full of the sleeping.

But this is the slowed-down season

held fast by darkness

and if no one comes to keep you company

then keep watch over your own solitude.

In that stillness, you will learn

with your whole body

the significance of cold

and the night,

which is otherwise always eluding you.

❄️

Winter Grace by Patricia Fargnoli

Posted in Adventure, attitude, awareness, beauty, Becoming Yourself, Encouragement, Faith, find art at pinterest, Glory, Happiness, Letting Go, mystery, nature, Prayer, Reality | Leave a comment

14 Jan 2016

what a glorious mess we are

We can’t find our path without getting messy. Messy comes with the territory. We came in messy. We learn messy. We love messy. We leave messy. I never found my way to clarity without first befriending confusion, in all its chaotic forms. I never found a path that felt like home before falling into quicksand. I never established a new way of being without trying the wrong way of being on for size. I never found the light without stumbling around in the dark. I never tasted God before getting a little dirt in my mouth. In the heart of the chaos is the clay that shapes us home.
Chaotic Magnificence!

🌀

– Jeff Brown an excerpt from the book Love it Forward

find photos at http://www.pinterest.com 

Posted in action, Adventure, attitude, awareness, beauty, Becoming Yourself, Change, Choice, create, find art at pinterest, Love | Leave a comment

13 Jan 2016

good stuff

Beloved,

you make the water of my life into wine,

my ordinary into your holy.
You request miracles of me

the moment before I know I’m ready.
What was for purification of uncleanness

you make into celebration of beauty.
You change my despair to gratitude

in secret, my dark certainty to wonder.
You make this life into a wedding feast,

my faithful marriage to the Holy One.
Always you turn piety into a party.

And always the best is yet to come.
This wine is not for discussion.

It’s to drink. It’s good. It’s really good.
Let’s dance.

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light

http://www.unfoldinglight.net

photos found at http://www.pinterest.com

Posted in action, Adventure, attitude, awareness, beauty, Blessing, Dancing, find art at pinterest, Glory, Happiness, healing, inspiration, Letting Go, Life, Love, Miracles, Poetry | Leave a comment

12 Jan 2016

what about now?

This moment

is the house of God

I am

right now

is the present moment

I can only know intimacy

fellowship

magic

when I stay

right here

now

be here now

give thanks now

see the blazing bush

take off my shoes

it’s all about now

stay aware

stay a while

live here

Love will build our home

you are welcome here

now

abide

with me

come on a my house

come on home

to me

🏡

Even on a perfectly still morning,

nothing moving,

trees frozen into the ground,

sky frozen to itself,

still, (how is this?)

here you are,

burgeoning into being,

the roaring sun

silent between the trees,

(everyone I meet, your blossoming!)

what is only just becoming

humming in becoming,

(the more still I am

the more vibrant it is)

everything thrumming with you

and the silence of your delight,

your anticipation

of what even you,

even now,

are just discovering,

—oh look!—

just becoming.

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light

http://www.unfoldinglight.net

photos found at http://www.pinterest.com 

Posted in attitude, awareness, Becoming Yourself, beloved, connection, Faith, find art at pinterest, Glory, home, Letting Go, Life, Love, Reality | Leave a comment

11 Jan 2016

seeing eternity

Let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; And to bleed willingly and joyfully. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving; To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy; To return home at eventide with gratitude; And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

– Kahlil Gibran

My language the size of a seed, small and frozen for a winters night…the sweet drain of being married to the fire side heat and slippers …

Honey drenched while walking towards the woods …

tender landscape of icicles frozen on glass…

a mirror wiped dry of reflection…

something pierced deep in the breast while creating less, and easing into body’s rhythm

the howl of the moon, the darkness too bright…

devoured by love…

seeking water but kept thirsty…

fabulous root in the deep of my core…a sigh left for longing…

Beauty,

Donna Knutson

 Under the light of eternity things, the daily trivia, the daily frustrations, fall away. It is all a matter of getting to the center of the beam.
~ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

photos found at http://www.pinterest.com

Posted in Adventure, attitude, awareness, beauty, Becoming Yourself, big, Choice, find art at pinterest, Life, Love, mystery, nature, perceptions, Prayer | Leave a comment

10 Jan 2016

arriving. departing.

Above the mountains
the geese turn into

the light again
painting their

black silhouettes

on an open sky.
Sometimes everything

has to be

enscribed across

the heavens
so you can find

the one line

already written

inside you.
Sometimes it takes

a great sky

to find that
first, bright

and indescribable

wedge of freedom

in your own heart.
Sometimes with

the bones of the black

sticks left when the fire

has gone out
someone has written

something new

in the ashes

of your life.
You are not leaving.

Even as the light

fades quickly now,

you are arriving.
…

The Journey by David Whyte

photos found at http://www.pinterest.com

Posted in action, Adventure, attitude, awareness, beauty, Becoming Yourself, Choice, create, Encouragement, Faith, find art at pinterest, healing, home, Life, Love, Miracles, moment, mystery, Poetry | Leave a comment

08 Jan 2016

perhaps

We talk about balance…
as if…

we can actually achieve such a thing

in this,

the odd numbered trinity-teeter-tottered

kaleidoscope of a heart, soul and mind

living within the human pie crust

we name skin!
It is our work

our great career –

to keep opening to the liquid mystery

of living in this very moment.

Free will choice,

our supreme gift –

our supreme curse.
Oh, yes,

we want things fixed.

We want to know,

to define truth,

to arrive and settle,

to judge others through our personal lens,

to be right, of course.
How do we live with the reality of ‘seeing in part’,

through a ‘dark veil’,

with just glimpses of the light in the night sky,

we fish in the darkness,

trying to catch one small piece of a star at a time,

just to have it burn out,

leaving us to go back and try again?
This is the life of the seekers,

the mystics,

the warriors,

who have been seized with the firm belief –

that life matters.

That love is the way to healing.

That there is always more of God to be had.

The mystery gets bigger with each illumination.

The balance comes from allowing it all.

Good. Bad.

Joy. Sorrow.

Sickness. Pain.

Poverty. Wealth.

Even the broken path,

the truth and the lies,

have eternal divine purpose.

Our task to

learn,

open,

love,

trust,

forgive,

heal,

move,

sing,

dance,

create,

keep letting go,

keep changing,

be present,

through it all.
We dream the large dreams of living into our best selves.

We focus intently on each small task before us.

We think,

We listen,

We give,

We receive.

We speak, when necessary.

We walk daily in vigilance.

Letting the legacy of each day stand on it’s own.

We live knowing our next choice is always our most important….

and so it goes

🌀

Sometimes you have to leave

what you think you know

behind.

No one ever really wants to do this.

Knowing things

can be very comforting.

All day, soul whispers

what I need to know.

I don’t hear her

until I lay aside

cherished beliefs and assumptions

until I dare to be with the not-knowing.

And then. . . .

Well, that’s the risky part, isn’t it?

There is no telling

what living an ensouled life

might ask of us.
~Oriah “Mountain Dreamer” House
So this is where I am in writing the book, “The Choice,” -on the great plain of not knowing, offering myself- pen in hand- anyway. Each day, the darkness yields to the light, and words hit the page, surprising me. This is what it’s like: the light coming again and again, the darkness making the illumination breath-taking.