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

💙   🙏🏼   💙

It matters.

THE POET 

moves forward
to that edge

but lives sensibly,

through the senses
not because of them.

Above all he watches
where he steps,
as if it matters

where he leaves his prints.

The senses overwhelm him
at his peril.

Though he must be taken
by something greater.
That is what he uses
senses to perceive.
....

~ David Whyte

wu wei. yes.

___________________________________________________________________________

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

...give ourselves a breather

get out of our own way

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

whoa, man

parallel ally

David Whyte

HAUNTED

is a word that denotes an unresolved parallel, a presence that is not quite a presence; a visitation by the as yet unspeakable - it is also emblematic of the longing for incarnation, of an unbearable substrate of wanting, of not finding a home in this world or in the next, someone or something that walks the halls of our house or our mind looking for what will help to lay its own self to rest.

What haunts us is something that seeks its own disappearance, it wants to become fully itself and so depart. If we feel continually haunted over time we begin to become ghost-like ourselves and roam with intent whilst not quite knowing the object of our intention. Looking in the mirror, our face begins to look like our not quite incarnated life. We walk not exactly existing in the world we visit. Like the spirits and half-beings we imitate at Halloween, we roam the streets as if looking for an abode on this earth we are unable to locate, demanding tribute from those who dwell within. The exorcism of an unwanted spirit is consistent the world over: an invitation to return home; for it and for us to find our way back, to cease our restless ways and to quit disturbing others lives or walking their houses by night.

We cease to be haunted when we cease to be afraid of making what has been untouchable, real: especially our understandings of the past; and especially those we wronged, those we were wronged by, or those we did not help. We become real by forgiving ourselves and we forgive ourselves by changing the foundational pattern, and especially by changing our present behavior to those we have hurt. A fear of ghosts, or a fear of our own haunted mind is the measure of our absence in this world. We cease to be afraid when we give away what was never ours in the first place and begin to be present to our own lives just as we find them, even in facing what we have banished from our thoughts and made homeless, even when we do not know the way forward ourselves. When we make a friend of what we previously could not face, what once haunted us now becomes an invisible, parallel ally, a beckoning hand to our future.

We banish the misaligned when we align with what we are called to, we become visible and real when we give our gift and stop waiting for the gift to be given to us. We wake into our lives again, as if for the first time, laying to rest what previously had no home through beginning to speak, beginning to make real and beginning to live, those elements constellating inside us that long to move from the invisible to the visible.
…

‘HAUNTED’ From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. © David Whyte

David Whyte COURAGE

is a word that tempts us to think outwardly, to run bravely against opposing fire, to do something under besieging circumstance, and perhaps, above all, to be seen to do it in public, to show courage; to be celebrated in story, rewarded with medals, given the accolade: but a look at its linguistic origins leads us in a more interior direction and toward its original template, the old Norman French, Coeur, or heart. 

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made…

"This tiny, ruined, monastic fishing house in Cong, County Mayo, has been a place where, over the years, I have found the needed courage to both make and break promises: promises that have emboldened and promises that have imprisoned. The river flows strongly under its four square solidity, and three of its walls form a private shelter for necessary thought, the fourth wall is gone and looks down stream, where all our promises must flow. It is a structure that, all of its own, holds the courageous conversation between what is actually here and what has already gone." DW

yin yang

horses

live and breathe this way

without apology

~ relationship over territory ~

~ process over goal~ 

~ responsiveness over strategy ~

~ cooperation over competition ~

~ emotion and intuition over reason ~

~ situational assertiveness ~

~ balance of strength and sensitivity ~

yin by nature

yang culture

harmony challenging

...

I can't believe you

if I can't hear you...

❤︎

...inspired by Linda Kohanov's

'The Power of the Herd'

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not;
and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow