life: acoustic & amplified
poetry, quotes & thoughts about life
Archive for the category “People”
peaceful
To bring about peace in the world, to stop all wars, there must be a revolution in the individual, in you and me. Economic revolution without this inward revolution is meaningless, for hunger is the result of the maladjustment of economic conditions produced by our psychological states: greed, envy, ill-will, and possessiveness. To put an end to sorrow, to hunger, to war, there must be a psychological revolution, and few of us are willing to face that. We will discuss peace, plan legislation, create new leagues, the United Nations and so on and on; but we will not win peace because we will not give up our position, our authority, our money, our properties, our stupid lives. To rely on others is utterly futile: others cannot bring us peace. No leader is going to give us peace, no government, no army, no country. What will bring peace is inward transformation which will lead to outward action. Inward transformation is not isolation, is not a withdrawal from outward action. On the contrary, there can be right action only when there is right thinking, and there is no right thinking when there is no self-knowledge. Without knowing yourself, there is no peace.
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The First and Last Freedom, J. Krishnamurti
photos found at http://www.pinterest.com
photos by Fisherman Dan @ Branford, CT
Listen to Cat Stevens sing Peace Train
vision
Drinking from an Empty Glass:
A Letter to a Dear, Dark Friend
Yes, I know the government is corrupt. Yes, I know
there are people conspiring. Yes, I know people can
lack integrity. Yes, I know that western culture is materialistic.
Yes, I know that corporations are self-serving.
Yes, I know that the media is manipulative. Yes, I know
it is hard to trust love. Yes, I know that it can be difficult
to believe in God. I share many of your concerns.
And I also know that we cannot change the world
without acknowledging what is wrong. I know that we
must stand against that which shames, oppresses and
damages humanity. I know that we should not ignore
the injustices and put on a fake smile. I know that we
must find our voice and stand our ground. I know that
we must fight for our right to the light. I believe deeply
in forward moving criticism.
But something doesn’t feel quite right. You complain
all the time. You have made negativity a full time
job. You don’t make an effort to find solutions. You
blame everything on the world out there. You don’t actually
do anything positive to effect change. And you
seldom acknowledge the positive steps humanity has
made. You seldom acknowledge the beauty around
you. You almost never see the light in the darkness.
I know something from my lived experience. I
know that the light is always there. It is there, in the
breath that keeps you alive, in the smile of a child, in
the yet another chance to find your path. It is there in
the rise of the feminine, in the therapeutic revolution,
in the burgeoning quest for authenticity. If you can’t see
it, then the issue is a personal one, for there are signs of
progress everywhere.
And I also know from a lifetime of overcoming that
it is possible to hold it all at once. To fight against injustice
while still embodying the light. To see where we
are lacking, while rejoicing in our abundance. To express
our anger, and to live our gratitude. To feel overwhelmed
by an unfair world, while still achieving our goals. To see how
far we have yet to travel, while applauding how far we have come.
And so I wonder what lives below your perpetual
negativity? Apart from the problems with the world,
what happened that darkened your lens? What made
the glass so empty? Is it really all about the world ‘out
there’, or are there also unresolved personal experiences
that need to be healed? What are you really trying to express
about the lack of love, attention, and satisfaction
in your life? What lives below this victimhood? What is
your deeper complaint? What needs to expressed and
resolved so that you will see some light shining through
again? Please don’t wait until the world is perfect, for it
will never be so.
Dear friend, how can I help you to believe again?
👀
(~Jeff Brown an excerpt from ‘Love it Forward’)
In every moment we make a decision — whether conscious or unconscious. Will I choose to open my heart, send love, withhold judgment and thus free myself from fear? Or will I close my heart, project fear instead of extending love, judge others, and thus bind myself to fear? The choice is mine and mine alone.
— Marianne Williamson
Like a tree our growth depends upon our ability to soften, loosen, and shed boundaries and defenses we no longer need.
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Trees grow up through their branches and down through their roots into the earth. They also grow wider with each passing year. As they do, they shed the bark that served to protect them but now is no longer big enough to contain them. In the same way, we create boundaries and develop defenses to protect ourselves and then, at a certain point, we outgrow them. If we don’t allow ourselves to shed our protective layer, we can’t expand to our full potential.
Trees need their protective bark to enable the delicate process of growth and renewal to unfold without threat. Likewise, we need our boundaries and defenses so that the more vulnerable parts of ourselves can safely heal and unfold. But our growth also depends upon our ability to soften, loosen, and shed boundaries and defenses we no longer need. It is often the case in life that structures we put in place to help us grow eventually become constricting.
Unlike a tree, we must consciously decide when it’s time to shed our bark and expand our boundaries, so we can move into our next ring of growth. Many spiritual teachers have suggested that our egos don’t disappear so much as they become large enough to hold more than just our small sense of self—the boundary of self widens to contain people and beings other than just “me.” Each time we shed a layer of defensiveness or ease up on a boundary that we no longer need, we metaphorically become bigger people. With this in mind, it is important that we take time to question our boundaries and defenses. While it is essential to set and honor the protective barriers we have put in place, it is equally important that we soften and release them when the time comes. In doing so, we create the space for our next phase of growth.
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by Madisyn Taylor
Daily OM
photos found at http://www.pinterest.com
you get to choose
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
🌎
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
It’s all connected
All the love
All the loss
All the joy
All the pain
The world is made of God
We live in the ocean of his breath
Life is love is truth is love is Life
All connected
Everything I really needed to know
I learned from the ocean
and the trees.
The mountains
Introduced me to the angels.
Acorns were my very first teachers and the finest flock of seagulls
were my most recent.
We are the temple
‘We’ includes the universe
we find ourselves in
brothers and sisters
to stars and starships
🌎
AL
how do we ever ‘win’ in this world?
Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love even more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant.
#HenriNouwen THE INNER VOICE OF LOVE
http://wp.henrinouwen.org/rgroup_blog/
HEARTBREAK is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight. Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is our indication of sincerity: in a love relationship, in a work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete’s quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.
Heartbreak is inescapable; yet we use the word as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will also keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way…
David Whyte
Live today. Remove all blame from your vocabulary. Catch yourself when you find yourself using your past history as a reason for your failure to act today, and instead say, “I am free now to detach myself from what used to be”. – Dr Wayne Dyer
what is being responsible, truly?
what horrors do we shackle ourselves to in the name of responsibility?
how do we break the chains of control
of manipulation
of tradition
of condition
of religion?
and follow the the truth of our hearts
of being in control
of only our own lives
of our own destinies
of our souls true callings?
this is not about shirking our responsibility
or being selfish
or leaving people in the lurch
this is about coming from a place within
of being
of awareness
of beloved
of freedom
of disciplined action
seeing below the lying distractions so ready to keep us deluded
then allowing all things to flow from us
to the ones we love
it’s the only way to truly live responsibly
in fact, it’s the only way to truly live
🔹
AL
photos found on facebook
love just is…there is no understanding why
A man asked him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments…” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the realm of God!” And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the realm of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” They were greatly astounded and said to one another, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”
—Mark 10.17-27
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We continually have to resist the belief that there’s something we have to do to “be saved.” We think there are “good” people (the man thought Jesus was one) and others who are less so. We believe our salvation is up to us. Clearly the disciples think so. Were that true, of course it would be impossible. But it’s up to God. And God has already “saved” us.
Take note that Jesus looks at the man and loves him. The man does not need to do anything for Jesus to love him; he already does. He responds to the man not with requirements but with love. Because that’s his point. There is no requirement. God already loves us. We are already saved. There is no salvation beyond God’s love; God’s love is not insufficient for our eternal joy. All we need to be “saved” from is our own distrust. The man seems to have great possessions but “lacks one thing.” Jesus looks on him in his poverty and sets him free: let go of what you can measure and what you can lose—either riches or goodness—and grasp only what is infinite, what is already yours.
Meditate on this infinite love of God. It is yours, now. It surrounds you, fills you, gives you every breath. You can’t deserve it more or less. It is simply here. Even as you ask and wonder, maybe even doubt, God looks at you with love. God’s delight is not up to you. Let this light break in, and become you.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
~ Rumi
Photos found at www.pinterest.com
what matters most
THE ANCIENT DREAM
She has come to sense the inner world goes deep, indeed deeper than the wounds and breakages that others inflict. The contemplative has broken through to that sanctuary in the soul where love dwells. Crucial to this contemplative journey is the trust and imagination to realize that regardless of how you have been damaged, there is within you a sanctuary of deep love, trust and belonging. This is the ancient dream, the masterpiece of divine creativity: the creation of the human heart. Before time – back in the winter of nothingness and then all through the infinite springtime of evolution – the dream was the birth of an intimate well of kindness, care and love in the world, dwelling in the tabernacle of the human heart.
🔹
John O’Donohue
Excerpt from BEAUTY
dear lord in this time of darkness
help us see the darkness
dear lord help us to not pretend
no more pretending
dear lord may our gaze be defenseless
and unshardable
teach us the piety of the open eye
dear lord in this time of darkness
may we be unafraid to mourn and together and hugely
may dignity lose its scaffolding
faces crumble like bricks
dear lord let grief come to grief
and then o lord help us to see the bees yet in the lavender
the spokes of sunlight down through the oaks
and the sleep-opened face of the beloved
and the afternoon all around her
and her small freckled hands
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Prayer by Teddy Macker
Hearts out searching for a home
that one place where we belong
it’s a cold dark night here lately
but I have seen the light
home is your arms
holding me tight
deeper and deeper into the beautiful
waking my heart to sing this song
fly with me as flames grow higher
passion flaming deep desire
touching us on this dark night
There are times when life goes hazy
that place we all fall down
life can be so hard my baby
will you hold the line tonight?
open up your heart and fight
we can do it together
love’s the place where dreams come true
we can make it together
I believe we can make it
through
there is hope in this moment
there is hope in the sky
when days go dark and lonely baby
as long as stars are burning bright
there is hope
there is hope, ’cause
they burn for you
oh baby
we can make it through
🔹
AL
Listen to Time of the Season by The Zombies http://youtu.be/wG5R7vyu-mA
photos found at www.pinterest.com
being alive
What is this hand in me, hanging on,
grabbing for what I do not need?
The clinging hand, white knuckled, fretting,
leads me and gets stuck in narrow places.
Grasping, be done. That yearning,
die in me. That whole hand, cut it off. Let it go.
The hand to possess, the foot to be elsewhere,
the eye to colonize, let them go. I am already myself.
Away with longing forever to be otherwise.
Better to enter life—yes, come in, come all the way in—
than stay in the grave the hand holds tight,
the unquenchable fire of always needing more.
Bend my wanting of trinkets, God. Give me thirst
for what is poured into me.
Unable to add to my infinite life,
I will only be this, alive.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
photos found at www.pinterest.com
what love looks like
Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word love, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.
-Maya Angelou
There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. I John 4:18
top photo by Fisherman Dan @ Branford, CT
other photos found on facebook
💞
It’s hard to love someone really,
especially the annoying, the arrogant, the cruel—
because I want to be separate from them.
I don’t want to be one with them,
soiled by their sin, associated with their dirt.
I want to push their boat off in a good direction
but not be in their boat.
But to love someone
is to cease judging the cruel as more cruel than I.
To love someone is to go to heaven or hell with them,
to put my arm around them and go together.
To lay aside my private little self
and be part of our divine oneness.
God leaves the perfect halls of heaven
to be one of us, to be us,
mucked in our grime, weak as the weakest of us,
blamed with our worst, frail, faulty and failed.
It’s not the gracious, condescending gesture
to the needy that makes it love;
it’s the absence of distance, the common wound,
it’s the arm around one, walking the way with one,
the resurrecting grace of giving your whole self away,
changing someone’s life by giving them yours.
It’s hard to love really because you have to die.
You disappear. You stop being separate,
stop being a little “one” so far from the “other,”
and be One. Less than that is zero.
But it’s easy to love, really,
when finally in our failure we give up
and throw away our pretensions of virtue,
and dump out the cardboard box
of our our whole useless heart and all its little pieces,
and, becoming so emptied… wait,
and God fills us with God’s only love
that flows through us without our having to bother
with the work of getting in its way.
It’s hard to love really,
until we empty out
and shine.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
God’s honest truth
HONESTY
is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.
The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door, as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.
Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay, honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell, the living, breathing frontier where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss.
– David Whyte
photo sources: top 2 photos by Fisherman Dan @ Branford, CT
other photos @ http://www.pinterest.com
life: acoustic & amplified 