A small bird with a red bonnet on its head came and perched on a rock opposite us. It waved its tail, turned its head anxiously in all directions, then glanced directly at us and as it did so, it grew bold and began to whistle softly, tauntingly at first; but soon it threw back its head, swelled its throat, and gazing at the sky, the light, burst into song with abandon. Everything vanished; nothing remained in the world save this bird and God: God, and a beak that was singing.
The songs of whales ring wistful, even melancholy,
to the human ear. Perhaps this tone belongs to all
who plumb the depths.
There is always music amongst the trees in the garden,
but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.
After Silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
For a composer silence is something pregnant with expectation ... the most naturally spiritual medium. The music grows in the spiritual life: the silence of monks, the silence of meditation, the silence of not knowing something, the terrible silence of God when we are confronted with evil in the world. Music has always been intimately connected with the numinous and the immaterial. I increasingly believe that the non-corporeal quality of music can be a direct challenge to the world and its materiality.
Wisdom is a living stream, not an icon preserved in a museum. Only when we find the spring of wisdom in our own life can it flow to future generations.
Cultivating our wisdom is one of our most important tasks. If we don't spend enough time alone listening to the counsel of our hearts, then we will never become wise. If we don't spend enough time in the presence of others who try to walk a path of heart, we will never become wise. If we do not cultivate, through prayer or meditation or spiritual practice, a stronger heart that can fly and endure, then we'll never become wise.
There is in all visible things
an invisible fecundity,
a dimmed light,
a meek namelessness,
a hidden wholeness.
This mysterious Unity and Integrity
is Wisdom, Mother of all,
"Natura naturans."
Holy wisdom embraces and enables our knowledge, judgment, insight, even as it draws us beyond them. We are given words when we have nothing to say. We are kept silent when we ache to run off at the mouth. We reach out when we would otherwise pull back, cut off, turn away. Our own wisdom is rooted in God's gift of wisdom to us. The soil it grows in is our daily lives, including our relationships with God, ourselves, and others. Only by trusting what little we know, by pushing the edges of our own wisdom, will wisdom grow.
Wisdom is not found on a computer chip. It pulses within our heart, in the flow of being, through the precision of stars keeping their courses. Wisdom is not the possession of any one person or group but is found when we realize our relationship to everything that is.
There is a goodness, a WISDOM that arises, sometimes gracefully, sometimes gently, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes fiercely, but it will arise to save us if we let it, and it arises from WITHIN us, like the force that drives us into a great blossoming like a pear tree, into flowering, into fragrance, fruit, and song, into the wild wind dancing, sun shimmering, into the aliveness of it all, into that part of ourselves that can never be defiled, defeated, or destroyed, but that comes back to life, time and time again, that lives — always — that does not die. Into the Divine.
Meditation and the "seeking of the silence within" are the
best methods of uncovering the wisdom of the spirit.
The wiser one is, the quieter one is, for the truly wise one knows, "I know nothing except that I must listen and through listening learn to speak and act. "
We were created for You by yourself,
and towards You our face is set.
We acknowledge You,
our maker and creator;
we adore your wisdom and pray
that it may order all our life.
We adore your goodness and mercy, and
beg them ever to sustain and help us.
The knowing heart is receptive to the intelligence of Being and is guided by Being. When the heart is awakened and purified, it establishes a connection to Spirit; our finest and noblest capacities are unlocked, our sacred humanness is revealed. What it comes down to, the distillation of all wisdoms, is this: we can rejoin our isolated wills with Love's Will through the knowing of the heart.
Pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our sleep, against our will, comes wisdom through the
awful grace of God.
Humanity is not alone in the universe, but
surrounded by infinite powers of love and
wisdom.
In the immense field of divine compassion, countless small life fields are interwoven with each other. When human hearts deepen through some form of contemplation, there emerges in them an intuition of human oneness prior to all separation ... a "communion of saints."In each religion's communal story, there is a way of handing on from generation to generation this transforming perception of universal solidarity in the Mystery. We do not learn such wisdom on our own. We receive this wisdom from someone else.
Wisdom has been defined as crystallized pain.
It is the distilled essence of experience: of
pain and pleasure, sorry and joy, darkness and light.
"Who will teach the young wisdom and discipline? "
Wisdom is not taught, systems are taught. Wisdom comes from experiencing life, or it never comes at all. And life is its own discipline.
"What produces growth and progress? "
Perhaps if we are not pushed and prodded or made to feel ashamed, we will achieve our growth — and our joy as well.
Sacred space is by definition liminal space. Because we are not in control and not the center, something genuinely new can happen. Here we are capable of seeing something beyond self-interest, self-will, and security concerns. True sacred space allows alternative consciousness to emerge.
In order to access the grace and power of heaven, we must first learn to live within the gap, that sacred space between our thoughts and judgments.
In the forest
was a path
which led on,
and on as if an access
to a deeper realm —
a place where peripherals,
the eddies at the edge of things,
were all forgotten,
and I entered
a silence of green,
became a soundless vortex
moving through stillness.
Most indigenous people will tell you that every location, every part of the Earth, has a spirit and is sacred. They would also say that this sacredness can be intuited, and can directly influence our choices. We can all learn from this wisdom.
Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. O Holy One, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. And we, clay touched by Thee, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, "How filled with awe is this place and we did not know it. "
Home is where the heart is not famished, the eye not starved, the Sacred not banished or desecrated. The Sacred cannot be caught in formulas. It cannot be analyzed, not even in terms of ecology, as beauty cannot be caught in the semantics of esthetics. Fingers pointing toward the Transcendent need no vocabulary, for they do not preach. Beyond the dialects of all religions they witness to a religious attitude toward life itself.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours.
May the clarity of light be yours.
May the fluency of the ocean be yours.
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow wind work
These words around you
As an invisible cloak to guard your life.
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred.
Remember, remember the sacredness
of things: running streams and dwellings
the young within the nest
a hearth for sacred fire
the holy flame.
Suddenly I heard the sound; it was
the sacred whispers. The whispers
come to me from the land, the
sky and the sea, and often they
urge me to be still. Above all,
the whispers signal change.
… a fire was lit in my heart. My rational doubts and hesitations went up in smoke. My tepid faith, which had become that of the indifferent believer, was rekindled.
I was in front of the flaming bush. I wanted to take off my shoes. It was sacred ground. God was this sacred ground. God was within the entire creation. The entire creation was sacred ground.
I began to think of sacredness as a kind of dialogue between the human spirit and certain designated places. These sites that call forth reverence, awe, humility, and wonder — we make them sacred. It is a way of honoring those feelings in ourselves. And when we hear the songs the places sing, we hear our own most ancient voices.
The contemplation of sacred mountains with their special power to awaken another, deeper way of experiencing reality, opens us to a sense of the sacred in our own homes and communities — a sense that we need to cultivate in order to live in harmony.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew. … The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God appears with all parts in every moss and cobweb.
To be sacred, a place must be honored, treated with respect. It must gather and hold energy; be alive with the seen and unseen. Above all, a sacred place must be safe — for cells to open, boundaries to expand, what is normally hidden to come forth.
Sacred spaces help us access our own spirits. They offer us doorways through which we can pass, gateways to deepening our connections with nature and our elemental beginnings. Those connections lead us to wholeness; the more we experience the interconnectedness of our bodies and Earth's body, the more we heal spirit.
I always begin my prayer in silence, for it is in the silence of the heart that God speaks. God is the friend of silence, so we need to listen. For, it is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us that matters. Prayer feeds the soul — as blood is to the body, prayer is to the soul — and it brings us closer to God.
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever we so concentrate our attention that we completely forget our own ego and desires, we are praying.
And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. . . . I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.
To clasp one's hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.
Prayer obtains what it is due to obtain — not what I personally want to obtain, which is different. It is useful that islands of prayer exist in the world, even if they are composed of only one person, or two, or three, or four.
My son opened my eyes to the unceasing nature of prayer in joyful moments which sometimes lie dormant in our hearts. I learn from him each day that God is in the little things — the things that can be found in the ordinary, here and now of life. Look in the minutiae of daily life in your everyday places, where Presence can be felt and where you can be submerged in unceasing prayer.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
Prayerfulness is an awareness of Presence … our "You are" to God in the quiet of our hearts and in the busyness of our lives. This awareness births a gentle passion within us — an ache and a longing of the heart — that is palpable. Through our prayerfulness, we become able to say to the One who is, "You created me in your image. You are. You have called me by name. You are. You provide for me. You are. You love me. You are. "Through our prayerfulness we discover that there is no place You are not.
There is a way of BEING prayer that is fully grounded in a personal relationship with the divine. It is the way of trust, in which we do not feel separate from the Source. The entrance to this way has everything to do with the sincerity and intention of the practice and little to do with the particular form of practice. Being prayer includes time and space for lightness and beauty.
Prayer is the soul's sincere desire
Uttered or unexpressed;
The motion of a hidden fire,
That trembles in the breast.