2019 aspirations

Optimism: hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something.

Forever Young....

Balance.....

Do Be Do Be Do Be Do Be

Way of Be-ing...

Authentic Confidence

Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings. - Victor Hugo


🌊 From a like-hearted connection, Experience:

There's a Place:

"Full Circle"

Hold it up
Fill your cup
Look out to sea
Feel what I see

Hold it up
Fill your cup
Look out to sea
Respect what I see

And I reason with you now,
Trying to find my way out
As she's singing all these songs
Oh, she's singing to heal my soul.
Find my place, find my reason
Oh, I been here so long
Oh, she's singing with the trees
Oh, she's singing to heal me

✨ espírito afim _/|\_

Gratitude and Compassion

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.

It turns what we have into enough, 
and more.

It turns denial into acceptance, 
chaos to order, confusion to clarity.

It can turn a meal into a feast, 
a house into a home, 
a stranger into a friend.

—Melody Beattie

💚🙏💚

healing

"Sometimes, when you heal, your body gets all better.

Infections leave. Wounds disappear.
You feel happier. Brighter. More positive.
Sometimes, healing looks very, very different.
An infection stays. An old pain resurfaces.
You don't feel 'healed' at all. You feel worse than ever!
Powerful and uncomfortable feelings emerge!
Rage. Deep sorrow. Terrors you never knew were in you!
(Ah, but they were, friend, they were...)
This is healing, too. This falling apart.
The image of 'healing' has been shattered.
The image was false.
Trust. Trust the energies that are moving through you now.
You may feel 'worse', yes, but you are getting better at living.
You are experiencing a deeper kind of healing,
one which doesn't match the mind's fantasies.
This is a reintegration. A death... and a rebirth.
Darkness emerging into light.
All the bits you ran away from,
coming to you now
for love and acceptance.
Throw away your childhood fantasies of healing.
Fall apart. Lose the future.
Die into the Now.
Break apart for love.
You are whole, even though
your dreams have been shattered.
This is true healing, then:
Recontacting the Wholeness that you are." 

~ Jeff Foster

🙏🏼

hello, little teacher II

**Update to one of my personally favorite posts from 2011,
as the lessons from this little teacher continue to deepen ....

Karmapa Dream Flag via Wikimedia Commons

The American primitive painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) reported watching an inch-worm crawl up a twig and then, clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach. “That’s me,” he said, “I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing.”
- Robert Genn

_______________________Original post below______________________

As I was waking up with my unsettled, loose-end'ish feeling self and starting the day today, I was sitting at this desk when I noticed this tiny little worm. 

I noticed as s/he/'it' moved along that at times the surface of the desk seemed slippery and it

struggled for traction.

Sometimes the cracks made it turn and

go another way.

Sometimes it would topple over and get back up.

It went over the cracks, down the tiers of the edge of the desk and back up again several times.

What is going on here?

I curiously wondered.

belonging. be.

THE HOUSE OF BELONGING

I awoke

this morning 

in the gold light 

turning this way

and that

thinking for 

a moment 

it was one 

day

like any other.

But 

the veil had gone 

from my 

darkened heart 

and 

I thought

it must have been the quiet 

candlelight 

that filled my room,

it must have been 

the first 

easy rhythm 

with which I breathed 

myself to sleep,

it must have been 

the prayer I said 

speaking to the otherness 

of the night.

And 

I thought 

this is the good day 

you could 

meet your love,

this is the gray day 

someone close 

to you could die.

This is the day 

you realize 

how easily the thread 

is broken 

between this world 

and the next

and I found myself 

sitting up 

in the quiet pathway 

of light,

the tawny close 

grained cedar 

burning round 

me like fire 

and all the angels 

of this housely 

heaven ascending 

through the first 

roof of light 

the sun had made.

This is the bright home 

in which I live, 

this is where 

I ask

my friends 

to come, 

this is where I want 

to love all the things 

it has taken me so long 

to learn to love.

This is the temple 

of my adult aloneness 

and I belong 

to that aloneness 

as I belong to my life.

There is no house 

like the house of belonging.

…

'The House of Belonging'

From The House of Belonging

Poems by David Whyte

© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

visions of heart's delight

Gratitude can turn a

meal into a feast,

a house into a home,

a stranger into a friend.

It makes sense of our past,

brings peace for today,

and creates a vision for tomorrow.

~Melody Beattie 

💚   🙏🏼   💚

When you are sorrowful,

look again in your heart,

and you shall see that in truth you are

weeping for that which has been your delight.
- Khalil Gibran

💙   🙏🏼   💙

maybe

we never know the consequences

..... of 'good' or 'bad' fortune:

_________________________________

From "The Path (What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life)"
by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, pp 79-80:

🙏🏼 here's to cultivating our inner farmer

to live with not knowing

HONESTY

is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door, as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.

Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay, honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell, the living, breathing frontier where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss.

…

HONESTY
In CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte & Many Rivers Press 2015

"....denying her wounds came from the same source as her power"

~Marie Curie