“Stillness is vital to the world of the soul. If as you age you become more still, you will discover that stillness can be a great companion. The fragments of your life will have time to unify, and the places where your soul-shelter is wounded or broken will have time to knit and heal. You will be able to return to yourself. In this stillness, you will engage your soul. Many people miss out on themselves completely as they journey through life. They know others, they know places, they know skills, they know their work, but tragically, they do not know themselves at all. Aging can be a lovely time of ripening when you actually meet yourself, indeed maybe for the first time. There are beautiful lines from T. S. Eliot that say:
“You carry Mother Earth within you, She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer. In that kind of relationship you have enough love, strength and awakening in order to change your life.”
“The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees—to learn something by being nothing a little while but the rich lens of attention.”
“Out here, no one is talking. Peace of mind is tangible.
A place you can feel your heart take each beat.
A place you can hear your soul sing your song.
Sometimes in the absence of noise, we find answers.
In solitude there is healing.”
These words by Alan Cohen were deeply felt today. Letting our inner being guide us, staying in calm center, going high… these are life goals along the journey of learning that is our life.
From Alan Cohen’s August, 2022, Easeletter:
“Relationships provide us with our greatest opportunities for spiritual growth. Some relationships bless us with love and joy, and others bring challenges that help us grow stronger and wiser. We can be grateful for everyone who comes our way, friend or apparent foe. Ultimately our foes are our friends because they teach us through important experience.
Dee and I recently did a real estate transaction. During the process we had a few tense moments in negotiations. Once while we were speaking with our realtor, I got a little hot under the collar and raised my voice a bit. Our realtor, a seasoned professional, did not get upset at all. Instead, her voice became softer and calmer. In contrast to my upset, she became a soothing, healing factor. Ultimately the transaction worked out perfectly for everyone.
When other people go low, that’s the time for you to go high. Every relationship is founded on vibrational agreement. You share an energetic match on what you are doing together and how. If someone grows upset with you or insults or attacks you, you may be tempted to become defensive and counterattack. Such a response just keeps going in circles and no one gets anywhere.
When you refuse to join another person in upset, you maintain the power to create a successful solution. “Let the one in least fear lead” applies to interactions between people as well as to the part of you that is in least fear. Your greatest power to get what you want and end a conflict is to stay established in your calm center.
My friend Jon Mundy used to be a Methodist minister. Then he discovered A Course in Miracles and began to weave its themes into his Sunday sermons. Some of his parishioners did not like the change and they began to complain. Eventually a rift grew within the church. “When I received a phone call from the region’s Bishop inviting me for a meeting, I knew he was going to fire me,” Jon recounted. “As I drove to the meeting, I kept reminding myself, ‘Don’t defend, don’t attack.’” At the meeting the Bishop fired Jon, but Jon went on to develop a new and much more rewarding career as A Course in Miracles teacher. Now Jon has published a number of successful books and he is in demand as a leading ACIM authority.
Will Rogers said, “Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.” If you don’t want to identify people as pigs, you can identify the pig element of the human psyche that finds reward in conflict and separation, and prefers to be right instead of happy. We are growing beyond that mentality. Should you slip for a moment and get into a negative vibrational match, remember Jesus’s teaching, “A soft answer turns away wrath.”
When eagles fly at a low altitude, crows sometimes come and peck at them to take away their food. Yet the eagle is much larger and stronger than the crow, with a wider wingspan. The eagle does not fight with the crow. It simply rises to an altitude the crow cannot reach. When crows go low, eagles go high.
Life on the planet can be challenging, and it can also be extremely rewarding. The best spiritual tools are the simplest. You have the power to heal conflict by turning to the part of your mind connected to your Spiritual source, and allowing your inner being to guide you.”
I have been witnessing. I have been attuned. I have been immersed in wonder and awe. Not every moment, every hour, but more and more and more. There are big forces out there responding in ways that are incalculable and hard to articulate. They are listening. They have been waiting. It is beautiful. It is interactive. I am learning each day to stay awake, as Rumi says, “don’t go back to sleep!”
Oh this life has so much inner expansion lying dormant for us to touch. Magnificent. Awe inspiring, wonder evoking…. These philosophers, poets and scientists words express this awe and wonder much better than I ever could, but I’m seeing it, feeling it, living it from my home to Chief Mountain – all sacred:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
― Albert Einstein
“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
― Carl Sagan,
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.”
― Richard Dawkins
“The obligation falls upon us to foster in ourselves the sensibilities that modernity has suppressed or even denigrated. … Without awe, our lives are impoverished, our society decays.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Awe, you see, is what moves us forward.”
― Joseph Campbell
“I suspect that it was simply that I had admired the earth, and the universe. The more I say and think that I admire it, and love it, the more it gives me what I admire, or strange coincidences that leave me in more awe than I was before.”
― Michael Whone
I am sitting with the rain, feeling its love, loving it in turn. I am finding beauty again.
The bed sheets are washing. Life. The gift prevails.
Sheets of rain now cleansing the tall trees. Cathartic. It is always Mother Earth.
This is a special day, as they all are of course, but today’s moments are more present to me. I feel it all out there waiting. With the ancestors. With Mom and Dad.
I’m torn equally between watching a Hallmark movie and studying physics. The secrets of the universe calling me urgently. Or Craig’s laughter. Or being absorbed by the rain.
Each drop a revelation.
I make the bed with the clean sheets. Aware. Aware. They smell clean and fresh. Soft softness in the smell, in the light outside, in my heart. And still the revelations of the universe come in each raindrop.
I take a long shower craving the freshness on my skin, the exhilaration of the water like raindrops. It’s well water after all, held deeply underground from the rain, now pouring over me.
The water dries easily off my skin, but holds fast on the glass shower enclosure. Note to self. Be like skin and not glass, absorbent and easily dried, not reflective and hard like glass, never allowing the rain, the water, in.
I put on my softest Buddha clothes, Buddha pants. The Buddha, now there’s someone who can shed light into the mysteries of this rain soaked day.
But I don’t need his enlightenment. Only my own.
I google to see if Arianna Grande is married (she is), read Bewilderment (Richard Powers – brilliant!), and a bit of Louise Erdlich’s, Future Home of the Living God (how did I miss this in 2017?), then Andrew Doerr’s, Cloud Cookoo Land (so creatively crafted) – it’s truly strange how these random books I’ve selected for no apparent reason have threads that make sense to read them all at the same time – and Adam and Eve (Sena Jeter Naslund). I print out a beautiful piece of art I found on Facebook of a woman embedded in nature with her animal self tangible and put it in a frame by my desk upstairs in the loft.
Then, I opt for the Hallmark movie, in my Buddha pants, and Craig’s laughter, fresh sheets waiting.
“The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter. Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on. When you give in to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it. When you take back your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, your creativity awakens and flows to become an active force of renewal and encouragement in the world. In this way, even in your own hidden life, you can become a powerful agent of transformation in a broken, darkened world. There is a huge force field that opens when intention focuses and directs itself toward transformation.”
-John O’Donohue
Focusing on the light as an active force of renewal and encouragement in the world… Thank you John O’Donohue, thank you to all the heart centered ones around the world doing all that they can, thank you for continuing to focus on the light, the goodness… It is difficult in these days. Let’s keep trying our best.
“Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings…The tree brings back all that has been lost through Christ’s extreme spiritualization, namely the elements of nature. Through its branches and leaves the tree gathers the powers of light and air, and through its roots those of the earth and the water… You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things. Why not go into the forest for a time, literally? Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books… ”
-Carl Jung
“Only when I walked into the forest did the world become whole again.”
