Category Archives: Glacier National Park

Mountains, Woods, Rivers, Lakes, Beaches – Find Me Inside

Mountains, Woods, Rivers, Lakes, Beaches….

 

This is the God or nature of Spinoza:

“God would have said:
Stop praying and punching yourself in the chest!
What I want you to do is go out into the world and enjoy your life.
I want you to enjoy, sing, have fun and enjoy everything I’ve made for you.
Stop going to those dark, cold temples that you built yourself and say they are my house!
My house is in the mountains, in the woods, rivers, lakes, beaches. That’s where I live and there I express my love for you.
Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you there was anything wrong with you or that you were a sinner, or that your sexuality was a bad thing!
Sex is a gift I have given you and with which you can express your love, your ecstasy, your joy. So don’t blame me for everything they made you believe.
Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can’t read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your son’s eyes…
you will find me in no book!
Trust me and stop asking me. Will you tell me how to do my job?
Stop being so scared of me. I do not judge you, I criticize you, nor get angry, or bother, or punishment. I am pure love.
Stop asking for forgiveness, there’s nothing to forgive. If I made you… I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies… free will. How can I blame you if you respond to something I put in you? How can I punish you for being the way you are, if I’m the one who made you Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who behave badly for the rest of eternity?
What kind of god can do that?
Forget any kind of commandments, any kind of laws; those are wiles to manipulate you, to control you, that only create guilt in you.
Respect your peers and don’t do what you don’t want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life, that your alert is your guide.
My beloved, this life is not a test, not a step, not a step in the way, not a rehearsal, nor a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing here and now and all you need.
I have set you absolutely free, no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one keeps a record.
You are absolutely free to create in your life heaven or hell.
I could tell you if there’s anything after this life but I can give you a tip. Live as if there is no. As if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist.
So, if there’s nothing, then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is, rest assured that I won’t ask if you behaved right or wrong, I’ll ask. Did you like it? Did you have fun? What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn?…
Stop believing in me; believing is assuming, guessing, imagining. I don’t want you to believe in me, I want you to feel in you. I want you to feel me in you when you kiss your beloved, when you tuck your little girl, when you caress your dog, when you bathe in the sea.
Stop praising me, what kind of egomaniac God do you think I am?
I’m bored being praised, I’m tired of being thanked. Feeling grateful? Prove it by taking care of you, your health, your relationships, the world. Feeling looked at, shocked?… Express your joy! That’s the way to praise me.
Stop complicating things and repeating as a parakeet what you’ve been taught about me.
The only thing for sure is that you are here, that you are alive, that this world is full of wonders.
What do you need more miracles for? Why so many explanations?
look for me outside, you won’t find me. Find me inside… there I am beating on you.”
-Spinoza

 

 

Roots

 

“Maybe you are searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots.”

-Rumi

“…The old that is strong does not wither,                                        Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

-J.R.R. Tolkien

“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”

-Virginia Woolf

The Wisest Balm

“When the mind is festering with trouble or the heart torn, we can find healing among the silence of mountains or fields, or listen to the simple, steadying rhythm of waves. The slowness and stillness gradually takes us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent. When serenity is restored, new perspectives open to us and difficulty can begin to seem like an invitation to new growth.
This invitation to friendship with nature does of course entail a willingness to be alone out there. Yet this aloneness is anything but lonely. Solitude gradually clarifies the heart until a true tranquility is reached. The irony is that at the heart of that aloneness you feel intimately connected with the world. Indeed, the beauty of nature is often the wisest balm for it gently relieves and releases the caged mind.”
-John O’Donohue
(from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace)

Know Your Essence

“Know your essence.

As you move through your life, you will claim many identities and belong to many tribes.

At some point, however, you realize this is not you being authentic, this is you being confused.

When you begin the process of dropping all identities, one after another, you reveal your true essence, which is you as a soul.

Let the rest go.”

-Sara Wiseman

Doors

 

“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few
but precious.

If you have a deep scar, that is a door.

If you have an old, old story,
that is a door.

If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it,
that is a door.

If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life,                       that is a door.”

-Clarissa Pinkola Estés

 

New Beginnings

And we always in all ways start anew.  In each breath, each moment, in our choices to be present and to be kind, we create the world. Last night felt like New Year’s Eve and this morning like a new dawn – but each day is that – has the potential for that – regardless the angst outside ourselves.  This I learn again and again…

“A new beginning! We must learn to live each day, each hour, yes, each minute as a new beginning, as a unique opportunity to make everything new. Imagine that we could live each moment as a moment pregnant with new life. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises. Imagine that we could walk through the new year always listening to a voice saying to us: ‘I have a gift for you and can’t wait for you to see it! Imagine!”

-Henri J.M. Nouwen

“There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.”

-Thomas Merton

Both quotes were found in the first chapter of the Artist’s Rule by Christine Valters Painter, a Benedictine oblate and artist. This book provides a twelve week journey of contemplation and creative expression that I’m just embarking on.  It is a deep dive.  This book is on our Sapphire Girl’s book list if you’re interested – seems a good journey to delve into just now with new beginnings inherent and the quiet of winter about to unfold to express them in.

Create the World

We Were Born for These Times,
by Rachel Alana, Midwives of the Soul
“In the 1980s, during the peak of the Lebanon War, an incredible study was conducted. It was hypothesized, based on many previous smaller experiments, that if enough people were connected in meditation, stimulating a “powerful field of peace” within – that there would be a radiated influence of peace *without*, ie. one that affected the behaviour of people in the outer world. Directed toward an area of conflict, in the words of John Hagelin, people would wake up and think “Hey, I’m not going to kill anyone today.”
About a thousand people came together for this experiment in Jerusalem; meditating together with an aim of peace in neighbouring Lebanon. Scientists charted, at the same time, “progress towards peace”. This translated to reduced war deaths, reduced injuries and numbers of bombs dropped, in the location where the meditation focused.
The data from this experiment was astounding. The correlation of “progress toward peace” was near “lock step” in alignment with the periods of meditation. Radiating this influence of inner peace, into outer peace in a conflict zone nearby.
When put through mathematical analysis, the likelihood that theses results were due to some fluke or chance were less than *one part in ten thousand*. To be able to assert something like this with such certainty, that group meditation prevented war, was an *incredible* finding.
When the results of this study were published in the Yale University Journal of Conflict Resolution, it ignited a firestorm in the scientific community. First of all, it took two years to publish the paper; the editors reviewed it and reviewed it, over and over, unable to believe the accuracy of these findings. Finally however, they came to the conclusion that the paper was “unassailable”. The study was performed at a standard of scientific rigour far beyond that required for publication, in any journal. But, when they did publish it, they did so with a letter – the letter saying the results of this experiment were so unexpected, ie. that a thousand people could influence the behaviour of *a million*, that they urged other scientists to go out and repeat the study.
And that is exactly what happened. Over the next two and a quarter years, seven other scientific collaborations went out and repeated the study, training and assembling groups of meditators, to see its effect on war. And in every one of these experiments during this two and a quarter year period, there was a marked reduction in war and violence. ie. An *eighty percent* drop in war deaths and war related injuries in comparison to all the other days during this period where there were no mediating groups. In *every single experiment* there was a highly statistical significance toward “progress toward peace” connected to focused intent toward it.
When put together, the results were amazing. The likelihood that this result of reduction of war was simply due to chance, was less than one part in ten million, million, million (ie. 0.0000001). There was far more evidence that group meditation can turn off war like a light-switch, than there was that aspirin reduces headache pain. It is a scientific fact.
— summarized from the words of Dr John Hagelin.
When we do the work of individuation, we burn through those things obscuring us to the Self, and can regain our connection to the whole. Things like egoic wants, fears, beliefs burn away in this work, toward our inner diamond – the lighthouse that can shine through the darkness to create a better world. This is not some utopian ideal. As the above study shows, it is a scientific *fact*. While this incredible study shows the power of unifying together to bring higher states into the collective, it also hints at the incredible power that lies within each of us, to raise consciousness here. *Now*. We are not powerless, just the contrary, we each have *great power*.
Together it is an “unassailable fact” that we can create the world our souls know, deeply, should exist here, but has instead lost its way. To bring in peace, love, unity and wisdom, purely through our true and deepest state of Being. An Indra net of souls, of diamonds, who meditate and do the inner work, to save our world. We can choose to engage in the old, eternal battles that serve a few and create untold suffering – of difference and separation, of divide and conquer, of fear and violence, or we can reach our eternal Self and connect with our brothers and sisters across the planet, and lift our world – one stuck in so much ignorance – up. Into *consciousness*.
There is great hope, and it is in us. Each of us. You and me and the eternal Self within, uniting us like lanterns across the world through the dark. The greatest work just may be in silence. The meek may truly inherit the earth – an earth that teeters now on a knife’s edge. Perhaps we truly were born to be midwives at this epoch between the Ages. To help birth true Light, peace, love, wisdom here – wholeness; standing strong in the storm together through its birth pangs past ignorance, fear and suffering. Holding hands together toward a greater state of being.
Let’s try.”
-Rachel Alana

 

You Are a Part of Me I Do Not Yet Know

“What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say—as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact:

You are a part of me I do not yet know.”

-Richard Rohr