O Beloved,
your way of knowing is amazing!
The way you recognize every creature
even before it appears.
The way you gaze into the face
of every human being
and see all your works gazing back at you.
O what a miracle
to be awake inside your breathing.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.
On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Part of being human is to experience moments of true perception about those things that touch you so intimately that suddenly you see. What you see (or read or hear) at such moments has a ring of truth about it, not just of a general kind but as something that takes on a dimension and depth for you so that it becomes your truth. It seems to be making a claim on you. Such moments don't come often. Hold on to them. Cherish them until they become so much a part of you as to be second nature. For there is only one persistent demand made upon us by the Spirit. It is that we are receptive. That we keep our eyes open, our minds unclosed. It is, in short, that we retain all our lives our sense of wonder.
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
The practice of paying attention is the rarest of gifts because it depends upon the harshest of disciplines. So uncommon is it for us to grasp the beauty and mystery of ordinary things that, when we finally do so, it often brings us to the verge of tears. Appalled by our own poverty, we awake in wonder to a splendor of which we had never dreamed.
In my life-long impatience, how much I have missed. Last night, washing the dishes, I really looked at my iron frying pan in the dishwater. The light made visible for a moment a tiny rainbow—a light through water revealing all the colors of life. It is so easy to miss the tiny symbols. Finding them is quite different from the business of trying to hatch up big symbolic experiences. It is RECOGNITION, not PURSUIT, of meaning—recognition of the sacramental, of the intersection of the two worlds, breaking through unsought because one is ATTENDING.
Maybe the burning bush was burning all the time and Moses didn't notice. Maybe the miracle is when you stop and pay attention.
Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was. I would only open my eyes a little more...
When I fully enter time's swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.
Because of my blindness, I had developed a new faculty. Strictly speaking, we all have it, but almost all forget to use it. That faculty is attention. In order to live without eyes it is necessary to be very attentive, to remain hour after hour in a state of wakefulness, of receptiveness and activity. Indeed, attention is not simply a virtue of intelligence or the result of education, and something one can easily do without. It is a state of being . . . a state without which we shall never know wholeness. In its truest sense it is the listening post of the universe.
The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.
All of my life has been a relearning to pray—a letting go of incantational magic, petition, and vain repetition ""Me Lord, me," instead of watching attentively for the light that burns at the center of every star, every cell, every living creature, every human heart.
Each age has its own tasks. For most of us now, our monasteries have no walls except the silence our meditation gathers to the center of our lives, and this is enough—it is more than enough. Our hermitage is the act of living with attention in the midst of things; amid the rhythms of work and love, the bath with the child, the endlessly growing paperwork, the ever-present likelihood of war, the necessity for taking action to help the world. For us, a good spiritual life is permeable and robust. It faces things squarely knowing the smallest moments are all we have, and that even the smallest moment is full of happiness.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
When all striving ceases
I awaken to behold
Ever-present Awareness
Keeping silent watch.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Dance is meditation in movement, a walking into silence where every movement becomes prayer.
Joy, love and compassion are essential ingredients in spiritual growth. We are enriched by their nurturing, and our world is enriched by their actualization. Profound joy is a celebration of our vision of connectedness, a vision that dissolves division and the myth of separation. We must let our hearts dance and rejoice with love and compassion and yearn wholeheartedly for oneness and wholeness.
I see dance being used as communication between body and soul to express what is too deep to find words.
Our life is shorter than flowers.
Then shall we mourn?
No, we shall dance
Plant gardens
Dress in colors
And teach our children
To make the world more beautiful.
Because our life
Is shorter than flowers.
One sound seldom heard on a prison yard is the sound of someone singing. Yet, unmistakably, I heard the joyful voice of my inmate friend, Ed, singing in the dormitory shower. It was positively liberating to hear him sing, totally immersed in the music.
Having no material goods, no family, and serious health problems, Ed confided that he has no reason whatsoever to be happy and sing like that. He said, "I have a happy spirit and it's just natural to sing and dance."
Nothing is more commendable than to live lyrically, to make our lives a continuous song of experience...To let go into the music, to dance, to spin and sway as the sounds resound in your bones, to feel your feet grow lighthearted as they sweep you along to the rhythm of the music, is to touch into the harmonies of the soul.
The first thing that must change is that in me which insists upon the smaller view of myself and tries to make that permanent... I watch my personality from the reality behind it. In that moment I am no longer identified with ego. Spirit begins to emerge and know itself. The dance changes! I no longer dance to become worthy or prove my value. I do not dance to measure up or earn that which has belonged to me all along. I dance because I dance.
Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain.
We laugh together like we never have before. Her face radiates pure joy. She's a good little dancer, music in her blood...maybe a word from God. She's so happy and strong , despite her world crumbling around her, that I can only gaze in awe. She leaps into the air, giving shape to the music that reposes in all matter, just waiting to be released. She liberates the music and, in her innocence, cannot know what she has done and thereby is all the stronger. Is God speaking to this tired old heart? Is God saying, "Look — don't you get it? She's as marvelous as a galaxy. You have nothing to fear. If I can call her into being, there's nothing I can't do. Now dance. Dance!"
All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child. And children know what we adults often forget, that is—our bodies are made to move, to "embody" our joy, to keep us in touch with our own breath and pulse, and to make us feel alive.
I carve cathedrals
with the sweep of my arms
I turn whirlwinds of change
I center and ground
deep bend to the earth
recenter and move
scooping sorrow like birds
each motion rebalancing somehow
earth and sky
self and divine
sacred love and sacred growth
temple dancer's work
spinning the world into balance
exhausted heap I fall
satisfied
And Joy is Everywhere;
It is in the Earth's green covering of grass,
In the blue serenity of the sky.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait... In the darkness shall be the light And the stillness the dancing.
To one who waits
all things reveal themselves,
so long as you have the courage
not to deny in the darkness
what you have seen in the Light.
Hope is the foundation or beginning step of faith and an essential expression of love. It provides the formless general aspiration for that which is higher and better, and then faith fills out the picture with the specific shape that a better self or a better world would take. As the expression of love, it sends that image out to the loved one and to the universe. By hoping you are taking an active part in the process by which the present creates the future.
One Breath
Here, in the silence
And stillness between
I find myself offering
A small breath of hope
For the world.
Hope is a human act of commitment to and investment in the future. Hope is an act of human courage that refuses to cherish the present too much or be reduced to despair by present circumstance. Hope is the capacity to relinquish the present for the sake of what is imagined to be a reachable future...
Sureness about God's large resolve...is a summons...Now is the time for yielding justice, for foolish forgiveness, for outrageous generosity, for elaborate hospitality. None of these acts can come from fear, anxiety, or despair. But they are all acts that evoke new futures that the fearful think are impossible. Hope in the end is a contradiction of the dominant version of reality...it is at the root of human well-being, for ourselves as for all our would-be neighbors.
I see in [these] folks the human capacity for change, for redemption, for forgiveness. I believe that every one of us, made in God's image as we are, has that capacity. Our challenge is to learn to call it forth in each person. Our hope is that we will succeed.
How shall the mighty river
reach the tiny seed?
See it rise silently
to the sun's yearning,
sail from a winter's cloud
flake after silent flake
piling up layer upon layer
until the thaw of spring
to meet the seedling's need.
Make tender, Lord, my heart:
release through gentleness
Thine own tremendous power
hid in the snowflake's art.
Above all, hope is based on relationships, on a collaborative connection with people as well as a higher power.
There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Suddenly an influx of light, though it was late, filled my room. I looked out and saw that the pond was already calm and full of hope as on a summer evening, though the ice was dissolved but yesterday. There seemed to be some intelligence in the pond which responded to the unseen serenity in a distant horizon.
Look deeply into your life.
Search out the hidden things
within your circumstances.
The beauty is there.
Comfort and forgiveness are available.
Hope is always waiting
for you to find.
Dusty cobblestones glow in the darkness
I walk out thinking the moon is illuminating them
but the sky is only pinkness
A city engulfed in its own smog and light
Red sky prophesies say this is the end of days
A lone frog singing says the days will last
Outside I am overcome
Inside I am too big for my own cage
Shining intensity at my own smog
It glows too brightly
to see the moon
or stars beyond
I wait for a shift
For things to end
Or for a miracle
that will come
and clean everything
Like the rain
the frog is calling
Wild winter winds depart
in a final, dying howl.
Blackbird returns, a red-winged
oracle of spring,
announcing new life and renewed light,
shimmering with possibilities
of ever-circling Hope.
Compassion takes practice to flow freely from the heart.
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love others. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverence for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love others for what they are, not for what they say.