sey090

In contemplative practice, you refuse to identify  with any one side, while still maintaining your intelligence.   You hold the creative tension of every seeming conflict and  go beyond words to pure, open-ended experience,  which has the potential to unify many seeming contradictions.  Notice how wordy political and academic discourse is,  and how quiet monks and hermits are. It really is a different way of knowing,  and you can tell it by its gratuity,  its open-endedness, its compassion... Fr. Richard Rohr

The gift of God is absolutely gratuitous.  It's not something you earn. It's something that's there. It's something you just have to accept. This is the gift that has been given. There's no place to go to get it. There's no place you can go to avoid it. It just is. It's part of our very existence. And so the purpose of all the great religions is to bring us into this relationship with reality that is so intimate that no words can possibly describe it. ~ Thomas Keating with thanks to louie, louie

Letting go In order to hold one I gradually understand How poems are made. There is a place the fear must go. There is a place the choice must go. There is a place the loss must go. The leftover love. The love that spills out Of the too full cup And runs and hides Its too full self In shame. I gradually comprehend How poems are made To the upbeat flight of memories. The flagged beats of the running  Heart. I understand how poems are made. They are the tears That season the smile. The stiff-neck laughter That crowds the throat. The leftover love. I know how poems are made. There is a place the loss must go. There is a place the gain must go. The leftover love. ~ Alice Walker

And yet, though we strain against the deadening grip of daily necessity, I sense there is this mystery: All life is being lived. Who is living it then? Is it the things themselves, or something waiting inside them, like an unplayed melody in a flute? Is it the winds blowing over the waters? Is it the branches that signal to each other? Is it flowers interweaving their fragrances or streets, as they wind through time? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke (from: Book of Hours , translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty:  to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves,  more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others.  And the more peace there is in us,  the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.  ~ Etty Hillesum from An Interrupted Life: The Diaries  with thanks to louie, louie Hillesum suffers great inner turmoil during her young adulthood, but increasingly transforms into a woman of maturity and wisdom. She writes: "Everywhere things are both very good and very bad at the same time. The two are in balance, everywhere and always. I never have the feeling that I have got to make the best of things; everything is fine just as it is. Every situation, however miserable, is complete in itself and contains the good as well as the bad." In touch with the equilibrium of a bigger picture she is aware of, she continuously draws from this place to find meaning in her current reality. Her diaries record the increasing anti-J...

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated - in the main, abominably - because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires. Most of us, however, do not appear to be freaks - though we are rarely what we appear to be.  We are, for the most part, visibly male or female, our social roles defined by our sexual equipment. But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white.  We are a part of each other.  Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I.  But none of us can do anything about it.   ~ James Baldwin from Freaks and American Ideal of Manhood  

Desert and void. The uncreated is waste and emptiness to the creature. Not even sand. Not even stone. Not even darkness and night. A burning wilderness would at least be "something." It burns and is wild. But the Uncreated is no something. Waste. Emptiness. Total poverty of the Creator: yet from this poverty springs everything. The waste is inexhaustible. Infinite Zero. Everything wants to return to it and cannot. For who can return "nowhere?" But for each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being: the incomparable point, not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it. If you stop seeking, it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost, for you are, at last, nowhere. ...  The ALL is nothing, for if it were to be a single thin...

They are to be admired those survivors of solitude who have gone with no maps into the room without features, where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace, no path of danger to a cold summit to look back on and feel exuberant, no clarity of territories yet untouched that tremble near the human breath, no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds, no friendship of other explorers drawn into the dream of the unknown. No.  They do not belong to the outside worship of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior space where the senses have nothing to celebrate, where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human and a poultice of silence pulls every sound out of circulation down into the ground, where in the panic of being each breath unravels an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind, shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost, where only the red scream of the blood continues unheard without anonymous skin, and the end of all explorin...

Vincent had been in love with and proposed to several women, all of whom rejected him.  After so many failed relationships, Vincent eventually came to accept his fate. "I believe that certainly it’s better to bring up children than to expend all one’s nervous energy in making paintings, but what can you do, I myself am now, at least I feel I am, too old to retrace my steps or to desire something else. This desire has left me, although the moral pain of it remains."   Perhaps as a consequence of his lack of lasting romantic involvements, an expanded idea of the concept of love developed which seems to be revealed to us in several of Vincent's letters to his brother Theo. "Since the beginning of this love I have felt that unless I gave myself up to it entirely, without any restriction, with all my heart, there was no chance for me whatever, and even so my chance is slight. But what is it to me whether my chance is slight or great? I mean, must I consider this when I...

The way to find the real "world" is not merely to measure  and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground.   For that is where the world is, first of all: in my deepest self...  This "ground," this "world" where I am mysteriously present  at once to my own self and to freedoms of all other men,  is not a visible, objective and determined structure  with fixed laws and demands.   It is a living and self-creating mystery  of which I am myself a part,  to which I am myself my own unique door. ~Thomas Merton from Merton's Palace of Nowhere    by James Finley

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. - Henry Beston from The Outermost House with thanks to whiskey river 

There is a grace approaching that we shun as much as death, it is the completion of our birth. It does not come in time, but in timelessness when the mind sinks into the heart and we remember. It is insistent grace that draws us to the edge and beckons us surrender safe territory and enter our enormity. We know we must pass beyond knowing and fear the shedding. But we are pulled upward none-the-less through forgotten ghosts and unexpected angels, luminous. And there is nothing left to say but we are That. And that is what we sing about.       ~ Stephen Levine  from Breaking the Drought: Visions of Grace      

It's just by chance, who you are, but given myself I take care of this being. Nobody else will remember its hunger, cold, loneliness: I will be reminded, and care. This face, like an old watch, I carry wherever I go. Grandmothers, grandfathers, you pictures, you should forgive my regret: my wanting another. I carry it as you did. It belongs somewhere, and I am taking it there. On corners I let the wind have all the world, and I turn as a ship accepts the waves but is itself and has a voyage built into it, stubbornly. The choice of being who you are is offered us, or being nothing. The mask of myself is an old gift nobody else took. So I brought it here.         ~ William Stafford  with thanks to whiskey river    

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; At the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity. Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, And there is only the dance. ~ T.S. Eliot from Burnt Norton, #1 of  "Four Quartets"

It is the mind that frees us or enslaves. Driven by the senses we become bound; Master of the senses we become free. Those who seek freedom must master their senses. When the mind is detached from the senses One reaches the summit of consciousness. Mastery of the mind leads to wisdom. Practice meditation.  Stop all vain talk. The highest state is beyond reach of thought, For it lies beyond all duality. ~ The Amritabindu Upanishad

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment Like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be  between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, on...

I hadn't noticed till a death took me outside and left me there that grass lifts so quietly to catch everything we drop and we drop  everything. ~ Leonard Nathan

Sometimes hidden from me in daily custom and in trust, so that I live by you unaware as by the beating of my heart, suddenly you flare in my sight, a wild rose blooming at the edge of thicket, grace and light where yesterday was only a shade, and once more I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before. ~ Wendell Berry photo by Bryan Griffith

I am not I. I am this one Walking beside me whom I do not see, Whom at times I manage to visit, And at other times I forget. The one who remains silent when I talk, The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate, The one who takes a walk when I am indoors, The one who will remain standing when I die. ~ Juana Ramon Jimenez translated by Robert Bly

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, Not in Kaaba, nor Kailas, But here right within you am I.  ~ Kabir

In the story of Sir Galahad, the knights agree to go on a quest, but thinking it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group, each " entered into the forest, at one point or another, there where they saw it to be thickest, all in those places where they found no way or path ." Where there is a way or a path, it's someone else's way.  Each knight enters the forest at the most mysterious point and follows his own intuition. What each brings forth is what never before was on land or sea: the fulfillment of his unique potentialities , which are different from anybody else's...when the knight sees the trail of another, thinks he's getting there, and starts to follow the other's track, he goes astray entirely. ~ Joseph Campbell

You are sitting in a wagon being drawn by a horse whose reins you hold. There are two inside of you who can steer. Though most never hand the reins to Me so they go from place to place the best they can, though rarely happy. And rarely does their whole body laugh feeling God's poke in the ribs. If you feel tired, dear, my shoulder is soft, I'd be glad to steer a while. ~ Kibir art by Van Gogh