Category: Main blog

As interpreted by Daniel Ladinsky

With a deep bow of gratitude to sister Amina Janet who posted this lovely poem in her blog, “Love, Harmony, and Beauty #79”
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Take one of my tears,
Throw it into the ocean

And watch the salt in the wounds
Of this earth and men begin to disappear.

Take one of my tears
And cradle it in your palm.
Mount a great white camel
And carry my love into every desert,
Paying homage to every Prophet
Who has ever walked in our world.

O take one of my tears
And stop weeping only for sadness,

For there is so much More to this life
Than you now understand.

Take one of my tears
And become like the Happy One,
O like the Happy One —
Who now lives Forever
Within me.

When a drop from my Emerald Sea
Touches your soul’s mouth,
It will dissolve everything but your Joy
And an Eternal Wonder.

Then,
The Beloved will gladly hire you
As His minstrel

To go traveling about this world,
Letting everyone upon this earth

Hear
The Beautiful Names of God
Resound in a thousand chords!

Hafiz himself is singing tonight
In Resplendent Glory,

For the cup in my heart
Has revealed the Beloved’s Face,
And I have His oath in writing

That He will never again depart.

O Hafiz, take one of your tears,
For you are weeping like a golden candle-

Throw one tear into the Ocean of your own verse

And let the wounds
Of every lover of God who kneels in prayer
And comes close to your words
Begin, right now,
To disappear.

From: I Heard God Laughing – Renderings of Hafiz – Daniel Ladinsky

This wonderful practice was sent out with several others in Atum O’Kanes most recent “Deeper Story” blog post.

Atum’s programs and other information are available at: www.atumokane.com.
Recordings, teachings, and other information are available at: www.atumokaneteachings.com

The Good Seeds Practice
 As Reb.Zalman so generously shared, ”I am only the Aha’s that I integrated into my being and life. The others came and went like the weather.” Below are the four stages of integrating the good seeds insights that you long to have become a fruitful reality in you and your journey, rather than a potential that was never realized.

1. Plant the good seed deeply in the fertile soil of your heart. Spend time feeling how it touches the core and what arises in response.

2. Water the seed regularly. This is a practice that nurtures the seed as it is unfolding its potential in one. Pir Vilayat spoke of remembrance as the secret of life for we are always forgetting. Each time we water the seed we are deepening the impression of the wisdom within it upon our heart and mind.

3. Cultivate the good seed by creating conditions in your life that support its growth. Seek to remove or transform habits or circumstances that will block its full realization. As Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche advises, be very clear about what supports your spiritual path and what hinders it. Step out of ambiguity.

4. Harvest the fruits that have emerged from the good seed in you and in your life. Hazrat Inayat Khan advised one to honor the fulfillment of a calling. When we do so there is a blessing or empowerment that is given.

Good Seeds for 2022
•It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least 10 times a day. Why does this not happen in our culture? – Mary Oliver

• Kindness is my true religion. Love, compassion and tolerance are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity would not survive. – The Dalai Lama

• Throughout society today people feel great loneliness. The only thing that will bring happiness is affection and warm heartedness. – The Dalai Lama

•If I practiced anger, bitterness, or jealousy, my smile would disappear. – The Dalai Lama

• There is a Tibetan teaching that says what causes suffering, in the general pattern of how to be with others: envy toward the above, competitiveness toward the equal, and contempt toward the lower. – The Dalai Lama

• It takes time. We are growing and learning how to be compassionate, how to be caring, how to be human. – The Dalai Lama

• God created us and said, “Go my child, you have freedom.” And God has such incredible reverence for freedom that God would much rather we went to hell than compel us to come to heaven. – Desmond Tutu

• I would usually go to my chapel if I had something that really upset me. I would lambast God. You can go to God and speak all you have, pouring it out in that fashion. – Desmond Tutu

• Righteous anger is usually not about oneself. It is about those one sees being harmed and whom one wants to help. – Desmond Tutu

• Hope is based on the firm ground of conviction. I believe with steadfast hope there can never be a situation that is utterly hopeless. – Desmond Tutu

• A question to Desmond Tutu: You have been able to maintain joy in the face of suffering. How have you been able to do that? “Well, I have certainly been helped by others. One of the good things is realizing you are not in a solitary cell. You are part of a wonderful community. That helped very greatly. You open, you blossom, really because of other people.” – Desmond Tutu

• See yourself as a playful being in a blessed universe. – Meister Eckhart

The quotes of the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu are from the book they created together, The Book Of Joy. If you have a negative view of Christianity and do not see its relevance in our time, I suggest reading In God’s Hands by Desmond Tutu.

The wonderful Emergence Magazine has published these ten love letters to the earth by Thich Naht Hahn who died last week on the 22nd of January.

It seemed a beautiful and fitting way to honor his legacy so I am passing that link on to all of you beloveds:

https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/ten-love-letters-to-the-earth/

I was just blessed to spend two days in a webinar by Mirabai Starr on Theresa of Avila. We dove deep together with 60 or so other souls into the words and poetry of this amazing saint who, through her work, carries us into the crystal palace of our innermost longings. I can’t recommend highly enough Mirabai’s books on the subject. Per her suggestion, I’d recommend beginning with “Saint Theresa of Avila – Passionate Mystic.”

On today’s Instagram posting, Mirabai (assisted by Willow) offered this blessing that struck me with such resonance I felt I had to share it.

“It’s not as if falling in love with the Divine rescues us from the travails of the human condition. Our partners betray us sometimes and our dead remain dead. It’s that keeping the heart open, even in hell, makes space for the Beloved. It is in the darkest nights of our souls, when all we know is that we know nothing, that the presence of the sacred may quietly well up, mingling with our pain and connecting us to a love that will never die.”

~ Mirabai Starr – from her most recent and profound book “Wild Mercy.”

One of my favorite and most treasured practices from my Sufi Tradition is called “The Four Surrenders.” A link to the full practice is included below.

Lately, I have been feeling a deep sense of unraveling and re-assessment of everything I “know” – all of the stories that make up the life I walk through.

It all started with an intense and vivid dream in which I was walking with friends, one of whom was indigenous, in a large garden or arboretum. As we walked we found signposts identifying different aspects of the garden but they were full of colonialist stories that simply didn’t reflect the reality of the land and its ancient stories. So at each place, we stopped and put up arrows pointing in many different directions.

As I sat with this dream in meditation and consultation with beloved friends and teachers, I understood this was a view of my inner garden. And a calling to consider all of the stories I thought were real and the many different ways they might now be able to evolve.

But my ego put up quite a fight when I started this work. Fear of loss and being abandoned and alone all rose up in my heart as I considered letting go of all those stories.

I sat one afternoon in my sit spot near a lovely creek and was reminded of what it does so exquisitely and beautifully – surrender and flow.

I began the four surrenders practice. Briefly, either using the breath or prostrations (or both), that entails letting go of all that is standing in the way of being in the now; then letting go of all your identities, the small self, the labels you assign to yourself (e.g, teacher, father, social justice worker…); then surrendering the need to KNOW anything, and finally surrendering into the arms of the Divine.

As I sat in this practice in the presence of the manuscript of Nature that demonstrated perfectly what I needed to remember, with the guidance of the creeks flow, I fell into a fifth surrender – letting go of even the lap of the Divine and accepting that none of it is real. That there is NOTHING there.

From that place of emptiness, each breath became a new blessing, each moment a new opportunity to open to a new story. A new story, granted by grace, that at that moment was the story that lifted up the whole creation in beauty and harmony and love. But with no attachment, because in the next breath – all five surrenders happened again and everything was emptiness.

The Sufi poem by Shabistari (that is also a Dance of Universal Peace) circles and splashes in my heart:

Go sweep out the chambers of your heart
Make it ready, make it ready
To be the dwelling of the beloved.

When you depart, love will enter
In you, void of yourself
God will display [their] beauty.

So, as the light begins its return for us in the Northern hemisphere of this heartbreakingly beautiful and magnificent and wounded planet, as the clock of our invented time tells us a new year has begun, as we are blessed with noticing our stories and making new choices – I offer this fifth surrender with love to all of my beloveds. May we all find hope, love, joy, community, and resilience in the face of the many challenges that stand before us.

Link to The Four Surrenders Practice

The breath practice below began the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Conspire conference this year and seems a good way to begin this new year.

As Richard Rohr noted in his earlier blogs this week, “If we trust the universal pattern, the wisdom of all times and all places, including the creation and evolution of the cosmos itself, we know that an ending is also the place for a new beginning. Death promises a new kind of life.”

And,
“Jesus came to teach us the way of wisdom. He brought us a message that offers to liberate us from both the lies of the world and the lies lodged in ourselves.”

Please enjoy this breath practice:

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Breathe with Us

As the 2021 Daily Meditations draw to a close and we enter the new year, we invite you to pray with the CAC staff and community with the words used to open our seventh and final CONSPIRE conference this past September:

In a world of fault lines and fractures,
we stand in a place where opposites come together,
awaiting the birth of what is to come.

If you are doubting, welcome.
If you are healing, welcome.
If you are angry at injustice, welcome.

We await a new genesis,
one more beginning in a series of starts,
trailing backwards in time to the very first day.

If you are afraid, welcome.
If you are joyful, welcome.
If you are longing to belong, welcome.

God’s generous rhythm of life, death, resurrection,
moving in and through all things,
the very breath and source of the cosmos itself.

Our pathways converge and continue,
each one of us a catalyst for loving action.
We, a community of saints. 
Conspire.
Breathe with us.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

“Me, Us, the World: Living Inside God’s Great Story,” CONSPIRE 2021 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2021), video.

Ahh, yes. Thank you dear Hafiz for the reminder that we are created for joy…

I sometimes forget that
I was created for joy
My mind is too busy
My heart is too heavy
Heavy for me to remember
that I have been
called to dance
the sacred dance for life
I was created to smile
to love
to be lifted up
and lift others up
O sacred one
Untangle my feet
from all that ensnares
Free my soul
That we might
Dance
and that our dancing
might be contagious.

Hafiz

In these darkest of days, with faith in the light returning, these words ring true and bold:

“Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born…”

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THE WINTER OF LISTENING

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

All this trying
to know
who we are
and all this
wanting to know
exactly
what we must do.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
to the lit angel
we desire.

What disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true
to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born…

…

From ‘The Winter of Listening’
David Whyte : Essentials
Many Rivers Press 2019
https://davidwhyte.com/collections/books/products/david-whyte-essentials
…

Winter Walk
Photo © David Whyte
Cassey Compton, Cotswolds.
Winter 2019

Where I Stand

From where I stand
Perched atop this 
pinnacle of privilege 

From where I stand
Mouth agape
Witnessing agape love

From where I stand 
These children of the One
Beautiful, painful, resilient 

From where I stand
I so undeserving 
They deserve so much more

From where I stand 
What can I give?
Can it ever be enough?

From where I stand 
Humbled, sad, despairing 
It can never be enough 

From where I stand 
Held as they are held
Surrendering as they surrender

From where I stand 
There is no hope
There is only hope.

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Today we served beautiful, sad families at the Mexican border, witnessing their sweet, resilient hope in the face of insane policies and horrific conditions. Their shy smiles, genuine laughter, harmonic song, and deep gratitude for each tiny gift moved me to tears. 

The mural above (*information about the artist below) fills one wall of the dining hall of the Kino Border Initiative shelter and I stood in front of it for a long time. I recommend zooming in and spending some time with it. It is a much more compelling version of the last supper in my humble opinion. 

We were able to serve a Christmas meal and distribute lots of toys. This little poem is my attempt to capture my heart’s feelings, from where I stand.

*Beginning Art Mural by Wenceslao Quiroz https://m.facebook.com/WenzGallery/

This comes from the inimitable Adrienne Maree Brown (from an article in Yes! Magazine. It felt appropriate and needed on this eve of our Solstice holy day:

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tucked into
stargazing wonder
we arrive so quickly to the
night of the longest moon

we too 
are rock moving water 
even when we feel adrift 
we are in orbit 
there is a force greater
than we can comprehend
we are enraptured
from the root
and never alone
even in shadow you hold us

and we sing a song
only the ocean can hear
sometimes it sounds like 
we are sorry
or 
we are dying
but sometimes 
we sing
we are of you, we are of you 
we are one*

we sing to the thumbprint of moon
ink on ink
shadow slipping through the cloudy cold
of winter
we sing 
of breaking the earth’s heart
and realizing it is our own

we sing forgiveness
we sing of the fire
between skin and dirt
the rivers within us
the storms we conjure
before we sleep

tonight we dream our longest dream 
of the farthest future 
we look in those children’s faces 
without regret 
without shame 
whispering: we will change everything for you

it is because of these dreams 
that we will remember 
to hibernate 
to slow down to the pace of snow
to feed on the memories
of a year we call good
because we survived it

we place our mouths to the sky
and cast this spell

may we all have a warm place
may we all have a soft blanket
may we all hold a steaming cup in our hands
may we all know a sated belly
may we all have a shoulder for our grief
may we all set down what we cannot bear
may we all be unhunted 

may we all remember we are sacred
may we all touch our bodies in worship
may we all have room enough to stumble
as we dance to the moonlight’s subtle music

we dose this enchantment
with our holy intentions

and in this taste of eternal darkness
may we honor all that is black, and shadow
in ourselves, and in the world
may we crawl into the cave
carved especially for this season
and hear nothing but the quiet of stone
may we know, without question
that there is time for our rest
may we remember surrender
touching the dirt that holds our ancestors 
and our futures
with reverence

and in this way
may we all know the love of earth

*This line comes from the whales of Bahia, via Michaela Harrison.

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ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN is a writer, editor, activist, social justice facilitator, coach, speaker, and doula. Her books include Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, which she wrote and edited, and Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements, which she co-edited.