life: acoustic & amplified
poetry, quotes & thoughts about life
Archive for the category “Seasons”
holiness vs perfection
FINDING THE HOLY IN THE HOLIDAYS:
Holiness is the center that holds all peripheries; the ground beneath feet running to look for gifts, the held note of a song that leaves a listener silent in the busiest most glittering street. Holiness is a simultaneous form of invitation and gathering and a radical letting alone, of family, of food, of perspectives, the holy is reached through letting go, by giving up on perfection. Holiness is the rehabilitation of the discarded; the uncelebrated and the imperfect, into new unities, perceived again as gift. Holiness is the bringing of the outside into the inside, from where the inside can give again, transformed as if by its simple act of breathing in and breathing out, back into the world.
Holiness is memory independent of time, welling from the unspoken that holds together all words said at the busy surface; holiness marries hurry to rest, stress to spaciousness, and joy to heartbreak in our difficult attempt to give and receive and as a culmination can dissolve giver and receiver into one conversation, untouched by the hurry of the hours.
Holiness is not in Bethlehem, nor Jerusalem, nor the largest, most glittering, mall, unless we are there in good company, with a friend, with a loved one, with our affections, with our best and most generous thoughts, with a deep form of inhabited silence, or in a grounded central conversation with what and how we like to give. Holiness is coming to ground in the essence of our giving and receiving, a mirror in which we can see both our virtues and our difficulties, but also, a doorway to the life we want beyond this particular form of exchange.
Holiness is beautiful beckoning uncertainty: time celebrated and time already gone so quickly. Holiness dissolves the prison of time and lies only one short step from the present busy moment: just one look into the starry darkness of the mid-winter sky at the midnight hour, just one glance at a daughter’s face; just one sight of a distressed friend alone in the midst of a crowded celebration. Holiness is a step taken not to the left or to the right, but straight through present besieging outer circumstances, to the core of the pattern we inhabit at the very center of the celebration. Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the spirit of all our holy days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of on going surprise and with some wonder and appreciation, far from perfection, but inhabiting the very center of a beautiful, peripheral giftedness.
Finding the Holy in the Holidays
© David Whyte
I sat in the library
With the small silent tree,
She and I alone.
How softly she shone!
And for the first time then
For the first time this year,
I felt reborn again,
I knew love’s presence near.
Love distant, love detached
And strangely without weight,
Was with me in the night
When everyone had gone
And the garland of pure light
Stayed on, stayed on
Christmas Light by May Sarton
watercolor by Mary Lou Peters
in the fullness of time
The authority of God made all creation. But it was the affection of God that made all His children.
You are made of the dust of this earth, and you are made of the happiness of heaven. You are flesh and you are spirit, and you are of two worlds longing for the home of forever and Him.
No matter your story before, this is your beginning now: you were formed by Love…for love.
– Ann Voskamp
how do you wait?
On January 17, 2012 I added these words to the ‘Other Words’ page of this blog…
Timing is everything. How do we wait on things we want more than life? How many times have I run ahead of God and not waited? Almost always. It never seems to get any easier for me, yet I have learned the value and the importance and so I struggle to incorporate this all important lesson into my life. Timing…learn timing…timing is everything. Wait for the right gift, wait for the best blessing, wait for exactly what you need to be prepared and given to you…in the fullness of time!
Help me, dear Lord! May I wait in peace and be ready for action when you show me the way!
💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞
Here we are entering the time of year known as Advent aka Waiting for Jesus to Come.
The only way we can wait is if we believe the waiting will, ultimately, bring us all the things that have been promised! Then the waiting is worth it!
I believe! My foundation is built on solid rock and the roots of faith have grown down deep through the storms of life.
And so I wait the coming of what has been promised! For as long as it takes! I will focus and I will wait! ACL
Prepare your way in me, Lord,
prepare your way in me, my Lord.
Make my rough places smooth,
the crooked make straight, my Lord.
Lay your hand at my root,
that I may bear fruit, my Lord.
Come and empty my heart
of all things but you, my Lord.
Guide my feet in your way,
fill me with your peace, my Lord.
Prepare your way in me, Lord,
prepare your way in me, my Lord.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net
beautiful perspective
Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf. –Albert Schweitzer
Photos by Fisherman Dan @ Branford, CT
warrior
The moment that he begins to walk along it, the warrior of light recognises the Path.
Each stone, each bend cries welcome to him. He identifies with the mountains and the streams, he sees something of his own soul in the plants and the animals and the birds of the field.
Then, accepting the help of God and of God’s Signs, he allows his Personal Legend to guide him towards the tasks that life has reserved for him.
On some nights, he has nowhere to sleep, on others, he suffers from insomnia. ‘That’s just how it is,’ thinks the warrior. ‘I was the one who chose to walk this path.’
In these words lies all his power: he chose the path along which he is walking and so has no complaints.
Paulo Coelho
Manual of the Warrior of Light
The sun punches through the cloud gaps
with strong fists and the wind
buffets the buildings
with boisterous good will.
Bad memories are blown away
over the capering sea. Life
pulls up without straining
the jungle tangle between us
and the future.
Easy to forget
the last leaves thicken the ground
and the last roses are dying
in their sad, cramped hospitals.
For gaiety’s funfair whirls
in the gray squares. Energy
sends volts from suburb to suburb.
And April, gay trespasser,
dances the dark streets of November,
Pied Piper leading a procession
of the coloured dreams of summer.
“April Day in November, Edinburgh” by Norman MacCaig
stay awhile
Autumn colors have settled
from Kandinsky to Rembrandt.
Trees cast down their crowns,
the ponds release their birds
bound southward, the sky
leaves its scarf in brown branches,
the round sun begins rolling up its things.
This scattering is also a drawing in.
Beds of leaves, mounds of leaves
the color of old books gather and rest.
The ground receives it all
and begins its dark, profound work
beyond my seeing, beneath my bones.
Even the leaves of childhood
and the sky’s drama of my long youth,
the naked, willing wood of trees,
and all the things piled around on my desk
like leaves when I return to the house,
are gathered in someone else’s hands,
bedded down, held close
for the long, bright winter.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net
Ripening
You Are Being Lead
“The life and death of a human being is so exquisitely calibrated as to automatically produce union with Spirit.” —Kathleen Dowling Singh
Ripening reveals much bigger or very different horizons than we realize. The refusal to ripen leads to what T.S. Eliot spoke of in “The Hollow Men,” lives that “end not with a bang but with a whimper.” I hope that you are one of those people who will move toward your own endless horizons and not waste time in whimpering. Why else would you even read this? Perhaps these meditations may help you trust that you are, in fact, being led. Life, your life, all life, is going somewhere and somewhere good.
Ripening, at its best, is a slow, patient learning, and sometimes even a happy letting-go—a seeming emptying out to create readiness for a new kind of fullness—which we are never totally sure about. If we do not allow our own ripening, and I do believe it is somewhat a natural process, an ever-increasing resistance and denial sets in, an ever-increasing circling of the wagons around an over-defended self. At our very best, we learn how to hope as we ripen, to move outside and beyond self-created circles, which is something quite different from the hope of the young. Youthful hopes have concrete goals, whereas the hope of older years is usually aimless hope, hope without goals, even naked hope—perhaps real hope. Such stretching is the agony and the joy of our later years.
Old age, as such, is almost a complete changing of gears and engines from the first half of our lives and does not happen without slow realization, inner calming, inner resistance, denial, and eventual surrender, by God’s grace, working with our ever-deepening sense of what we really desire and who we really are. This process seems to largely operate unconsciously, although we jolt into consciousness now and then, and the awareness that you have been led, usually despite yourself, is experienced as a deep gratitude that most would call happiness. Religious people might even call it mercy.
Adapted from ‘Ripening,’ Oneing, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 11-12
Gateway to Silence:
Ripen me into fullness.
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
fearless
To go into the darkness with a light
is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark.
Go without light and find that the dark too, blooms and sings
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
– Wendell Berry
Black. out. black.
Black. on. black.
Dark. on dark. on dark.
I was simply looking for home.
Not knowing the current alley would lead
to where the sidewalk ended
I stepped off the edge
out of the world of light
waking into morning night
a banished sun
no stars
or moon
or streetlights
or fireflies
or lighters
in pitch darkness
I lay, unable to move,
senses adjusting
to what is my new reality
hearing the life
that lives here
wondering if I’ll make friends
while I’m here
learning this new space.
ACL 9/12/13
Sent from my iPhone
yellow
The leaves above the brook
begin their great journey now,
letting go and dropping into the water.
Who knows what worlds they will see?
Trees shed the weight of their work
and slip into something more comfortable.
Now the sun’s laying on of hands
is not so forceful, but more intimate, more gentle.
The hillside deepens from its reds and yellows
to the color of experience,
the color of knowing without having to say.
Leaves fall, each with its own little tap.
They gather in sorrow and gratitude,
ready to become what is next.
This is the season of bareness and of seeds.
This, too, is newness, and peace.
________________________
Weather report
Release,
as all that is passes
and becomes what shall be.
An occluded front of attachment passes,
allowing what is before us
to be beautiful enough.
_________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net
life: acoustic & amplified 
