Category: Main blog

 Earth Song 

Listen to things more often than beings.
Hear the voice of the fire, hear the voice of the water,
Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush:
This is the ancestors breathing. 
Those who are dead are never gone;
The dead are not down in the earth:
They are in the trembling of the trees,
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs, in the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd.
Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the woman’s breast, they are in the wailing of a child,
They are in the burning log and in the moaning rock.
They are in the weeping grasses, in the forest and the home.
Listen to things more often than beings.
Hear the voice of fire, hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush. 
This is the ancestors breathing.   

(Traditional from Senegal, translator unknown)

Friends, there may be a gap in these blog postings until mid-April as I’ll be traveling.

 The Real Work 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work, 

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey. 

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. 
The impeded stream is the one that sings.  

~ Wendell Berry ~ 

(Collected Poems)

What actions are most excellent? 

To gladden the heart of a human being. 
To feed the hungry. 
To help the afflicted. 
To lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful. 
To remove the wrongs of the injured. 
That person is the most beloved of God 
who does the most good to God’s creatures. 

~  Muhammad ~ 

 Wildpeace 

Not the peace of a cease-fire 
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, 
but rather 
as in the heart when the excitement is over 
and you can talk only about a great weariness. 
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. 
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows 
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. 
A peace 
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without 
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be 
light, floating, like lazy white foam. 
A little rest for the wounds – who speaks of healing? 
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation 
to the next, as in a relay race: 
the baton never falls.) 

Let it come 
like wildflowers, 
suddenly, because the field 
must have it: wildpeace. 

~ Yehuda Amichai ~ 

(The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell) 

From Panhala

 Ninth Duino Elegy
(excerpt) 

Praise the world to the angel: leave the unsayable aside.
Your exalted feelings do not move him.
In the universe, where he feels feelings, you are a beginner.
Therefore show him what is ordinary, what has been
shaped from generation to generation, shaped by hand and eye.
Tell him of things.  He will stand still in astonishment,
the way you stood by the ropemaker in Rome
or beside the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even a lament takes pure form,
serves as a thing, dies as a thing,
while the violin, blessing it, fades. 

And the things, even as they pass,
understand that we praise them.
Transient, they are trusting us
to save them – us, the most transient of all.
As if they wanted in our invisible hearts
to be transformed
into – oh, endlessly – into us. 

Earth, isn’t this what you want?  To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation,
is your deepest purpose?  Earth, my love,
I want that too.  Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over – even one flower
is more than enough.  Before I was named
I belonged to you.  I seek no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring. 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

(In Praise of Mortality, trans. and edited Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

I found this so moving and beautiful. “God utters me like a word.” “God… has called us… into the unknown.

From Emergence Magazine:

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/on-the-road-with-thomas-merton/

In May 1968, Christian mystic Thomas Merton undertook a pilgrimage to the American West. Fifty years later, filmmaker Jeremy Seifert and writer Fred Bahnson set out to follow Merton’s path, retracing the monk’s journey across the landscape. Amid stunning backdrops of ocean, redwood, and canyon, the film features the faces and voices of people Merton encountered. The essay offers a more intimate meditation on Merton’s life and the relevance of the spiritual journey today.

 The Way 

Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track.
It’s lost and gone.
Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.
Then I’ll make here my place,
(The road leads on),
Stand still and set my face,
(The road leaps on),
Stay here, for ever stay.
None stays here, none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh places I have passed!
That journey’s done.
And what will come at last?
The road leads on. 

~ Edwin Muir ~

(Collected Poems)

Vimala Thakar was a social activist and spiritual teacher born in India in 1921. In the 1950’s she was active in an organization that encouraged wealthy landowners to give land to the poor. They redistributed millions of acres through this program. She met Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1958 and decided she wanted to work on the inner life, but later she returned to her activist proclivities and worked with villagers throughout India teaching agriculture, self-rule, sanitation, and activism. I found these wise words that I originally posted in 2014 on Facebook and realized how timely and important they still are for all of us who strive for social change while holding our connections to the Divine.

“As soon as there is awareness of wholeness, every moment becomes sacred, every movement is sacred. The sense of oneness is no longer an intellectual connection. We will in all our actions be whole, total, natural, without effort. Every action or nonaction will have the perfume of wholeness.   

“In this era, to become a spiritual inquirer without social consciousness is a luxury that we can ill afford, and to be a social activist without a scientific understanding of the inner workings of the mind is the worst folly. Neither approach in isolation has had any significant success.    

“There is no question now that an inquirer will have to make an effort to be socially conscious or that an activist will have to be persuaded of the moral crisis in the human psyche, the significance of being attentive to the inner life. The challenge awaiting us is to go much deeper as human beings, to abandon superficial prejudices and preferences, to expand understanding to a global scale, integrating the totality of living, and to become aware of the wholeness of which we are a manifestation.   

“As we deepen in understanding, the arbitrary divisions between inner and outer disappear. The essence of life, the beauty, and grandeur of life, is its wholeness. Life, in reality, cannot be divided into the inner and the outer, the individual and social. We may make arbitrary divisions for the convenience of collective life, for analysis, but essentially any division between inner and outer has no reality, no meaning.   

“The total revolution we are examining is not for the timid or the self-righteous. It is for those who love truth more than pretense. It is for those who sincerely, humbly want to find a way out of this mess that we, each one of us, have created out of indifference, carelessness, and lack of moral courage. “

I’ve been thinking, reading, and posting a lot lately about the importance and indeed, the ethical responsibility for self-care, or as a what Donna Schaper, author of “Sabbath Sense: A Spiritual Antidote for the Overworked” called the “Sense of Sabbath.”

In our often hectic and overfull lives, it can be difficult to dedicate an entire 24 hours to putting away our devices, shutting off the need to get things done, and simply resting in the divine with our beloveds. Yet this has been a tried and true method for holding balance for thousands of years. It may be worth making the effort.

Yet, we can also simply engage our Sabbath sense in shorter time-frames and that will absolutely help us hold that balance and stay resilient in our work. Shaper suggests, “Sabbath Sense may be the chair we sit in when we come home, the coffee we enjoy once we get to work, the clothes we put on for a special occasion. Sabbath may be the breakfast out we have with each of our children before going to work on Friday. It may be simply a moment of memory at “off” times during the day or year.”

This poetry from a Panhala email felt like it says it well:

Any Morning

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People wont even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

~ William Stafford ~

(The Way It Is)

What’s In The Temple? 

In the quiet spaces of my mind a thought lies still, but ready to spring. 
It begs me to open the door so it can walk about. 
The poets speak in obscure terms pointing madly at the unsayable. 
The sages say nothing, but walk ahead patting their thigh calling for us to follow. 
The monk sits pen in hand poised to explain the cloud of unknowing. 
The seeker seeks, just around the corner from the truth. 
If she stands still it will catch up with her. 
Pause with us here a while. 
Put your ear to the wall of your heart. 
Listen for the whisper of knowing there. 
Love will touch you if you are very still. 

If I say the word God, people run away. 
They’ve been frightened–sat on ’till the spirit cried “uncle.” 
Now they play hide and seek with somebody they can’t name. 
They know he’s out there looking for them, and they want to be found, 
But there is all this stuff in the way. 

I can’t talk about God and make any sense, 
And I can’t not talk about God and make any sense. 
So we talk about the weather, and we are talking about God. I miss the old temples where you could hang out with God. 
Still, we have pet pounds where you can feel love draped in warm fur, 
And sense the whole tragedy of life and death. 
You see there the consequences of carelessness, 
And you feel there the yapping urgency of life that wants to be lived. 
The only things lacking are the frankincense and myrrh. 

We don’t build many temples anymore. 
Maybe we learned that the sacred can’t be contained. 
Or maybe it can’t be sustained inside a building. 
Buildings crumble. 
It’s the spirit that lives on. 

If you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart, 
What would you worship there? 
What would you bring to sacrifice? 
What would be behind the curtain in the holy of holies? 

Go there now. 

~ Tom Barrett ~  

(Keeping in Touch)

Please enjoy this practice from Fr. Richard Rohr’s Action and Contemplation blog.

It uses the Christ Jesus, but it works equally well if you wish to substitute Buddha, Mohammed (PBUH), Vishnu, Quan Yin, Atman, or simply all-present energy.

Practice: Word Becomes Flesh

I invite you to read these Daily Meditations contemplatively, going deeper than the mental comprehension of words, using words to give answers or solve immediate problems and concerns.Contemplation is waiting patiently.It does not insist on quick closure, pat answers, or simplistic judgments, which have more to do with egoic, personal control than with a loving search for truth.

Try reading the following ideas in a contemplative way:

Christ is everywhere.

In him every kind of life has a meaning and a solid connection.

Every life has an influence on every other kind of life.

Jesus Christ came to earth so that “they all may be one” (John 17:21) and “to reconcile all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Colossians 1:20).

Pick one idea and linger with it. Focus on the words until they engage your body, your heart, your awareness of the physical world around you, and most especially your core connection with a larger field. Sit with the idea and, if need be, read it again until you feel its impact, until you can imagine its larger implications for the world, for history, and for you. (In other words, until “the word becomes flesh”!)

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe(Convergent Books: 2019), 4, 7, 8.