wu wei. yes.

___________________________________________________________________________

Wu wei is a mental state
in which our actions
are quite effortlessly
in alignment
with
the flow of life. 

the one, the only

Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker

At eighty-two, the troubadour has another album coming.

Like him, it is obsessed with mortality, God-infused, and funny. 

By David Remnick

Leonard Cohen at home, Los Angeles, September, 2016.

Photograph by Graeme Mitchell for The New Yorker

October 17, 2016 Issue

from the article: When I asked him if he intended his performances to reflect a kind of devotion, he hesitated before he answered.

“Does artistic dedication

begin to touch on religious devotion?” he said.

“I start with artistic dedication.

I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on to the other

human receptors.

But I dare not begin from the other side.

It’s like pronouncing the holy name—you don’t do it.

But if you are lucky, and you are graced, and the audience is

in a particular salutary condition,

then these deeper responses will be produced.”

 

 (blessed to have been at the show in Charlottetown, P.E.I. on his 2008 tour)

by far, the most powerfully moving live performance I have ever experienced...

♥︎ thank you ray ♥︎

Only emptiness can give you more.

Any other kind of "more" becomes less,

intensifying your dissatisfaction

and cluttering your beingness.

- Mooji

life is a garden

not a road

we enter and exit

through the same

gate

wandering

where we go

matters less

than what we

notice

-bokonon

 

...give ourselves a breather

get out of our own way

matters of the heart

learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions.....

Solace ~David Whyte

is the art of asking the beautiful question, of ourselves, of our world or of one another, in fiercely difficult and un-beautiful moments. Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.

Solace is the beautiful, imaginative home we make where disappointment can go to be rehabilitated. When life does not in any way add up, we must turn to the part of us that has never wanted a life of simple calculation. Solace is found in allowing the body’s innate wisdom to come to the fore, the part of us that already knows it is mortal and must take its leave like everything else, and leading us, when the mind cannot bear what it is seeing or hearing, to the birdsong in the tree above our heads, even as we are being told of death, each note an essence of morning and mourning; of the current of a life moving on, but somehow, also, and most beautifully, carrying, bearing, and even celebrating the life we have just lost. A life we could not see or appreciate until it was taken from us. To be consoled is to be invited onto the terrible ground of beauty upon which our inevitable disappearance stands, to a voice that does not soothe falsely, but touches the epicenter of our pain or articulates the essence of our loss, and then emancipates us into both life and death as an equal birthright.

Solace is not an evasion, nor a cure for our suffering, nor a made up state of mind. Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part. Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.

To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape our identities and our bodies and our relation to others. Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it, we become useful and generous and compassionate and even amusing companions for others. But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable that is coming to you? And how will you endure it through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light and then just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away?

an invitation, not an answer......

Conversational Leadership

 What is the courageous conversation we are not having....

 

 'anything or anyone that

does not bring you alive

is too small for you'

    
Juicy!

we are startust

....He told me he had journeyed all over the world

trying to find himself,

and that wasn't enough to feed his restless heart.

So he journeyed into outer space,

still seeking something he couldn't quite pinpoint. 

...no outer journey will ever fulfill you.

It took going into outer space for him to realize that

we must all

make this inner space journey

back to Oneness.

~ Lissa Rankin sharing about a conversation she had with Edgar Mitchell

Vitamin L

The Truelove

There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of the baying seals
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,

and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them

and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love.

So that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all the years
you don’t want to any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.

David Whyte (House of Belonging)

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of

so they can see that it's not the answer.
- Jim Carrey