Mysticism and Spirituality Circle
A site to share inspirational poetry, readings, and practices to support our sangha of spiritual seekers on their paths.
Fr. Richard Rohr also speaks of this energy which is in all of us and in everything in his wonderful book: “The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe“
In this short daily meditation from Matthew Fox, he speaks of the energy of the Cosmic Christ as the wave of light that infuses everything and he walks through the spiral dance that is embodied in the Cosmic Mass which I hope we can bring to our Salish Sea community someday soon.
This is a beautiful practice for which you will need to take a device into the forest with you – or do as I did, and simply listen to it at home, then take the essence with you into your own quiet practice in a forest near you!
A Forest Walk
by Kimberly Ruffin
This guided practice by Kimberly Ruffin offers ways to connect to the living world through a walk in the forest.
Some of us were blessed and graced with a retreat in BC a couple weeks ago. Afterward Hayra and Murad Phil and Helen stopped in the Methow valley on the way home. Hayra sent this beautiful poem to me.
From sister Hayra:
Dear Community,
Returning from our annual Dance Retreat at Johnson’s Landing, BC, we always are blessed with a loving and gentle re-entry in the rolling nearly-naked contours of the Methow.
Here is a new poem that one of our hosts read to us, last week.
Rhoda used to live in Seattle and now lives outside of Winthrop. This poem is just one of the expressions of her deep Elderhood Wisdom. She can be reached at <rhodaw@methownet.com>
The Snag Speaks
By Rhoda Walter, June 2019
Look at me.
Don’t look away.
I have shed my skin.
My branches are bare.
My arms are akimbo.
No needles grace me.
I no longer give off a divine scent on a hot summer day.
Look at me now, as I am, not as I was when I was a Ponderosa queen.
Take me as I am – naked, open.
I am being fully who I am, no more, no less.
No hint of shame at my current condition or my current role.
I’m just here, giving.
A perch for birds, a meal of beetles, a home for woodpeckers.
A sentinel, a witness, a source of inspiration for you.
I know I am officially dead
But I still live, just in a different way.
I am surrendered to my stage in life.
One day I will lose another arm, and then another.
Someday, I will no longer be able to stand.
I will tumble down the hill and no longer grace the skyline.
Who will fall first? You or me? Does it matter?
I will be who I am, accepting my destruction, the rot, the invasions, the stripping away.
No worries, I will be me through all the phases to come.
Will you?
The Seven Of Pentacles
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
~ Marge Piercy ~
(In Praise of Fertile Land, edited by Claudia Mauro)
This is an important reminder that when we celebrate our freedom with weapons and reenactments of war and death we ignore and deny the suffering and trauma of so many of our marginalized humans and more than humans.
From dear brother Theo:
I don’t hear freedom tonight.
I hear gunshots punctuating the dark like sightless stars,
ravening thunder of war machines,
each crack the impact of whips on black flesh like twisted spines,
each flash slicing open the skin of the sky.
I see immigrant women drinking water from toilet bowls
in 2019, sewage swirled like galaxies you could drown a nation in,
if it were still breathing.
I see the dream of Democracy fallen to the earth,
ashen as a stillborn child, I see handprints of blood staining
America the Beautiful from sea to burning sea.
There is no freedom here,
only the screech of stolen innocence from infants throats, tiny
hands reaching through barbed wire. “Help me”
is the same in every language
and it smells like smoke and it sounds like cataclysm,
for America does not die quietly.
She is too proud for that. She’ll set the whole sky on fire
before admitting she was wrong.
NOTE: I will be traveling for the next 10 days so there may be a gap in these postings. Much love – Wakil
From our newest and our first Indigenous poet laureate:
Eagle Poem
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circles in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
~ Joy Harjo ~
(How We Become Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001)
Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith
Every summer
I listen and look
under the sun’s brass and even
into the moonlight, but I can’t hear
anything, I can’t see anything —
not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up,
nor the leaves
deepening their damp pleats,
nor the tassels making,
nor the shucks, nor the cobs.
And still,
every day,
the leafy fields
grow taller and thicker —
green gowns lofting up in the night,
showered with silk.
And so, every summer,
I fail as a witness, seeing nothing —
I am deaf too
to the tick of the leaves,
the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet —
all of it
happening
beyond any seeable proof, or hearable hum.
And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in the dirt
swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?
One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body
is sure to be there.
~ Mary Oliver ~
(West Wind)
Courtesy of Panhala (To subscribe to Panhala, send a blank email to Panhala-subscribe@yahoogroups.com)
Perhaps…
Perhaps these thoughts of ours
will never find an audience
Perhaps the mistaken road
will end in a mistake
Perhaps the lamps we light one at a time
will be blown out, one at a time
Perhaps the candles of our lives will gutter out
without lighting a fire to warm us.
Perhaps when all the tears have been shed
the earth will be more fertile
Perhaps when we sing praises to the sun
the sun will praise us in return
Perhaps these heavy burdens
will strengthen our philosophy
Perhaps when we weep for those in misery
we must be silent about miseries of our own
Perhaps
Because of our irresistible sense of mission
We have no choice
~ Shu Ting ~
(Translated by K. Kizer in Cool, Calm & Collected)
FATHER EARTH
By Clarissa Pinkola-Estes
There is a two-million year old man
No one knows.
They cut into his rivers
Peeled wide pieces of hide
From his legs
Left scorch marks
On his buttocks.
He did not cry out.
No matter what they did, he held firm.
Now he raises his stabbed hands
and whispers that we can heal him yet.
We begin the bandages,
The rolls of gauze,
The unguents, the gut,
The needle, the grafts.
We slowly, carefully turn his body
Face up,
And under him,
His lifelong lover, the old woman,
Is perfect and unmarked
He has laid upon
His two-million year old woman
All this time, protecting her
With his old back, his old scarred back.
And the soil beneath her
Is black with her tears.
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XXIX
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
(In Praise of Mortality, translated and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)