Freedom | life: acoustic & amplified

Archive for the category “Freedom”

22 Feb 2015

giving it all

there is no cage
love must be stepped into
freely.

there is no withholding
love gives it all away.

there is no have to’s
love must be given and received willingly.

there is no selfish motive
love always wants the highest and best for the other person.

there are no ‘no’s’
love always says yes.

there are no demands
love allows the other person to decide.

love takes commitment.

it is not an easy job,
both parties –
equal –
understanding the gift –
100 percent in.

you must choose what you want,
knowing the consequences of your choices.

Just know, for sure,
love will always set you free.

there is no fear in love.

ACL 2/22/15

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose without any insistence that they satisfy you.
– Wayne Dyer

We are not transmitting or receiving love as we were divinely intended to—we are filtering love rather than feeling it. We fell for the prevailing hysteria that said, “Protect your heart,” and we began to believe that love itself had enemies and needed protecting. When we were hurt, we felt that love was somehow diminished or damaged. But hurt has nothing to do with love, and love is unaffiliated with and unaffected by pain. Ego was hurt, not love. Love is divine; it is everywhere, ever present and abundant and free. It is a spiritual energy that is, at this very moment, flowing through the universe—through us, through our enemies, through our families, through billions of souls. It was never absent from our lives. It is not bound in our hearts or in our relationships, and thus it is not capable of being owned or lost. We have allowed our awareness of love to diminish; that is all. In doing so, we have caused our own suffering. We must mature and realize that freeing our mind of ancient hurts and opening once more to love shall give us access to divine strength. To stand emotionally open before the world and give of our hearts without fear of hurt or demand of reciprocity—this is the ultimate act of human courage. For this, we now declare: WE SHALL AMPLIFY LOVE.
Brendon Burchard
Declaration 7 from http://MotivationManifesto.com/
💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞
The light of the desert reaches down
into the crevices of the rocks,
can tell stone from shadow.

Holy One,
may I see myself with the eyes of love,
see clearly what in me is love
and what is not love.

Heal my fear,
forgive me wholly,
and hearten me
to choose well,
to step wisely.
_________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net

photo source tracks found at

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15 Feb 2015

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. – Harriet Tubman

To go forth now
from all the entanglement
that is ours and yet not ours,
that, like the water in an old well,
reflects us in fragments, distorts what we are.

From all that clings like burrs and brambles—
to go forth
and see for once, close up, afresh,
what we had ceased to see—
so familiar it had become.
To glimpse how vast and how impersonal
is the suffering that filled your childhood.

Yes, to go forth, hand pulling away from hand.
Go forth to what? To uncertainty,
to a country with no connections to us
and indifferent to the dramas of our life.

What drives you to go forth? Impatience, instinct,
a dark need, the incapacity to understand.

To bow to all this.
To let go—
even if you have to die alone.

Is this the start of a new life?

Departure of the Prodigal Son by Rainer Maria Rilke

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04 Feb 2015

I see you there on your cloud…will you see me?

Next to grace, I bet God thinks making us need each other was one of his best ideas.
– Bob Goff

There’s this progressive shedding that has happened as I walk into my own being. Being responsible for ONLY my own life is an ever challenging, evolving process.
Several years ago, much to my surprise, I found some people just didn’t like me. No real reason even, just a vibrant dislike vibe when I walked in. I am super sensitive and my nature is to want to be liked. Yup, I’m a giant people pleaser! My progress has evolved over years of learning, and is still a work in process.
Many years ago I would twist myself into weird shapes and do anything to make the other like me, then I slowly learned to allow it to be and not prove myself, or force anything. It has been a gradual, sometimes extremely painful, learning.
Parallel to that, there has been this great and mighty internal work going on, and as I have shed yesterday and baby-step by baby-step learned tiny, mind blowing truths about what love really looks like, I have also been growing into my own voice.
It’s a rather unexpected thing for me, it’s scary and challenging, and yet essential for me to step into my calling. my purpose here.
I am being called to share my experiences in walking this path. Called to be vulnerable and speak as myself. Now, when people don’t like me, I can’t fully say, ‘Well, they really don’t know me at all. They haven’t encountered the real me’, because, more and more of myself is becoming visible.
I feel very alone. I feel unprepared. I feel unworthy. I feel I’m not good enough. I feel afraid of many things, rejection is one of the biggies.
What I know for sure is…none of these feelings matter. This is bigger than me and I cannot say no. What I have gained is too valuable not to share.
Anyway, this has come out different and longer than I expected when I started writing. I am crying so I know it is what I need to say.
I just ask you to pray for me.
If you are reading this, you are a fellow pilgrim. Thank you for sharing this moment on path with me.
As we say in Kentucky to friends as we go our separate ways for a moment, ‘Ya’ll come see us soon, don’t be a stranger.’

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30 Jan 2015

we’re all just ex-babies! embrace it!

…everyone is involved, whether they like it or not, in the construction of their world. So, it’s never as given as it actually looks; you are always shaping it and building it. And I feel that from that perspective, that each of us is an artist. Secondly, I believe that everyone has imagination. That no matter how mature and adult and sophisticated a person might seem, that person is still essentially an ex-baby. And as children, we all lived in an imaginal world. You know, when you’ve been told don’t cross that wall, because there’s monsters over there, my god, the world you would create on the other side of the wall.
– John O’Donohue
http://www.onbeing.org/program/inner-landscape-beauty/transcript/1125

King Lear
THERE WOULD BE a strong argument for saying that much of the most powerful preaching of our time is the preaching of the poets, playwrights, novelists because it is often they better than the rest of us who speak with awful honesty about the absence of God in the world and about the storm of his absence, both without and within, which, because it is unendurable, unlivable, drives us to look to the eye of the storm. I think of King Lear especially with its tragic vision of a world in which the good and the bad alike go down to dusty and, it would seem, equally meaningless death with no God to intervene on their behalf, and yet with its vision of a world in which the naked and helpless ones, the victims and fools, become at least truly alive before they die and thus touch however briefly on something that lies beyond the power of death. It is the worldly ones, the ones wise as the world understands wisdom and strong in the way the world understands strength, who are utterly doomed. This is so much the central paradox of Lear that the whole play can be read as a gloss if not a homily on that passage in First Corinthians where Paul expresses the same paradox in almost the same terms by writing, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27-28), thus pointing as Shakespeare points to the apparent emptiness of the world where God belongs and to how the emptiness starts to echo like an empty shell after a while until you can hear in it the still, small voice of the sea, hear strength in weakness, victory in defeat, presence in absence.
I think of Dostoevski in The Brothers Karamazov when the body of Alyosha’s beloved Father Zossima begins to stink in death instead of giving off fragrance as the dead body of a saint is supposed to, and at the very moment where Alyosha sees the world most abandoned by God, he suddenly finds the world so aflame with God that he rushes out of the chapel where the body lies and kisses the earth as the shaggy face of the world where God, in spite of and in the midst of everything, is.
-Originally published in Telling The Truth
http://m.frederickbuechner.com/

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14 Dec 2014

everybody’s an artist

It seems to me that
paralleling the paths of action, devotion, etc.,
there is a path called art
and that the sages of the East would recognize
Faulkner, Edward Hopper, Beethoven, William Carlos Williams
and address them as equals.
It’s a matter of attention and discipline, isn’t it?—
combined with a certain God-given ability.
It’s what you’re willing to go through, willing to give, isn’t it?
It’s the willingness to be a window
through which others can see
all the way out to infinity
and all the way back to themselves.

The Way of Art by Albert Huffstickler

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10 Dec 2014

1 Comment

fly free

Carry her over the water,
And set her down under the tree,
Where the culvers white all day and all night,
And the winds from every quarter,
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.

Put a gold ring on her finger,
And press her close to your heart,
While the fish in the lake their snapshots take,
And the frog, that sanguine singer,
Sings agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.

The streets shall all flock to your marriage,
The houses turn round to look,
The tables and chairs say suitable prayers,
And the horses drawing your carriage
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.

Carry her over the water by W.H. Auden

Unable are the Loved to die
For Love is Immortality,
Nay, it is Deity
– Emily Dickinson

Posted in action, Adventure, attitude, awareness, beauty, Becoming Yourself, Choice, confidence, find art at pinterest, Freedom, Letting Go, Life, Love, www.pinterest.com

11 Nov 2014

the voice of calm still whispers

Times may turn dark;
they always have.
Our calling remains unchanged.
The voice of hope is undiminished.

The world may turn
toward ravage and greed;
the acid of fear stain our faces,
the voracious appetite of power
consume the earth and its silent ones,
but the Holy One’s tender mercy
does not waver or abate.
The voice of calm still whispers.

Your path may take you
through ulcered valleys of shadow.
The Gentle One is still with you.

Our path is not to save the world;
only One may do that.
Our path is to learn to love
even in the darkness.

Our calling is still to be woven in,
to cry out for the hurting,
to take mercy to the streets,
to be gentle among the violent
and strong amidst the fearful,
to mend the fabric even as it is torn,
to heal and bless even in our defeat.

Life may turn dark; it often does.
Crucifixion reoccurs.
But the world in its suffering
will be made pure light.
Even in the evening of our power,
even in the dusk of the world,
the light of the Merciful One shines on,
and we are given this: to share the light,
to share the light
until we ourselves are pure light.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.org

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10 Nov 2014

questioning

I must let go.
For so long I have held to the habit of holding on.
Even my muscles
Are tense; deeply fearful are they
Of relaxing lest they fall away from their place.
I cling clutchingly to my friends
Lest I lose them.
I live under the shadow of being supplanted by another.
I cling to my money, not so much
By a wise economy and a thoughtful spending
But by a sense of possession that makes me depend upon it for strength.
I must let go—
Deep at the core of me
I must have a sense of freedom –
A sure awareness of detachment – of relaxation.
I must let go of everything.
I must let go of pride. But—
What am I saying? Is there not a sense of pride
That supports and sustains all achievement,
Even the essential dignity of my own personality?
It may be that I must let go
My dependence upon triumphing over my fellows, which seems
To give me a sense of security in their midst.
I cringe from my pain; I do not relish
The struggle of life but I do not want to let go
Because the hurt and the tension of contest feed
The springs of my pride. They make me deeply aware.
But I must let go of everything.
I must let go of everything but God.
But God—May it not be
That God is in all the things to which I cling?
That may be the hidden reason for my clinging.
It is all very puzzling indeed. When I say
“I must let go of everything but God”
What is my meaning?
I must relax my hold on everything that dulls my sense of Him,
That comes between me and the inner awareness of His Presence
Pervading my life and glorifying
All the common ways with wonderful wonder.
“Teach me, O God, how to free myself of dearest possessions,
So that in my trust I shall find restored to me
All I need to walk in Thy path and to fulfill Thy will.
Let me know Thee for myself that I may not be satisfied
With aught that is less.”
Source: Deep Is the Hunger
howard thurman
prayer