I saw this quote from Thich Nhat Hanh the other day and wanted to share this wonderful reminder that everything we need to understand is always demonstrated and available to our senses and heart from the “One Holy Book, the sacred manuscript of nature” (Hazrat Inayat Khan)
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I asked the leaf whether it was afraid to fall since it was autumn and the other leaves were falling.
The leaf told me, “No. During the whole spring and summer, I was very alive. I worked hard and helped nourish the tree, and much of me is in the tree. Please do not think that I am just this form, because this leaf form is only a tiny part of me. I am the whole tree. I know that I am already inside the tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree.
That is why I do not worry. As I drop from the branch and float down to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, ‘I will see you again very soon.’”
Suddenly I had a kind of insight very much like the insight contained in the Heart Sutra. You have to see life. You shouldn’t say, life of the leaf, but life in the leaf, and life in the tree. My life is just Life, and you can see it in me and in the tree.
I saw the leaf leave the branch and float down to the soil, dancing joyfully, because as it floated it saw itself already there in the tree. It was so happy. I bowed my head, and I knew that we have a lot to learn from the leaf because it was not afraid; it knew that nothing can be born and nothing can die.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh “The Other Shore” (Parallax 2017)
Friday 3 December – Sunday 5 December – Screening of Mission:Joy
This screening of MIssion:Joy, a deeply moving and laugh-out-loud funny movie, has been arranged for the Ruhaniat Order and anyone else who is interested. In this wonderful film, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu share science-backed wisdom of how to live with joy in troubled times. You can find more details about the movie here: http://www.thefilmcollaborative.org/films/missionjoy
Check back here for details on where to watch our special screening of the movie with us or go to the Ruhaniat Calendar that will have details as soon as we receive them.
Tuesday 7 December – Spirituality in the 21st Century – 7-8:30 PM Pacific Time A Monthly Forum Dedicated to Connection, Practice, and Renewal
Join us to explore how an array of spiritual practitioners are synthesizing traditional spiritual paths to meet the needs of our time. Each meeting features a guest who will introduce their spiritual orientation and lead us in a practice. We will end with open dialogue and reflection. The purpose of these gatherings is to foster a sense of community and to revitalize and renew ourselves beyond a classroom setting.
Randy Morris, professor emeritus and founder of Spiritual Studies at AUS will guide our inaugural meeting.
Zoom Link: https://antioch.zoom.us/j/94543744740
Open to Antioch students, alumni, and anyone interested in sharing this experience.
15 December – Aramaic Lord’s Prayer- Part 1 – 7:30 PM Pacific Time
We will be offering the first half of the Aramaic Lord’s prayer.
When Jesus, or Yeshua in his own native language, was asked how to pray, the Aramaic words he offered, were far richer and denser in meaning than can be easily conveyed in English translation. We will be chanting those words, with multiple translations, and dancing the first half of the prayer, using movements that were inspired by movement practices of Middle Eastern mystics over the centuries.
Save the date. The Zoom link will be forthcoming!
Ongoing Ruhaniat Sufi Events Calendar
There are many different opportunities for online Zikr, Dance, Retreats, etc that can be found on the Ruhaniat Sufi Events Calendar here:
And our sibling Sufi organization the Inayatiyya also posts a calendar with many different opportunities to deepen your spiritual practice. You can find their calendar here:
Author and activist Holly Whitaker does not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to sobriety, but she fully embraces “surrender” as vital for any healing and recovery to occur.
I’d always considered the word surrender to be blasphemous. Surrender was never a possibility to consider; it wasn’t something self-respecting, self-reliant folk like me do—we scheme around and bulldoze through whatever stands in our way. That all changed, abruptly, on that day in 2012 when I finally ran out of options and did the thing I thought I could never do—concede.
In A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson says, “Until your knees finally hit the floor, you’re just playing at life, and on some level you’re scared because you know you’re just playing. The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.” [1] It is entirely cliché, but this was exactly my experience. The moment I finally let my knees hit the floor was when I finally stopped playing at life, and every bit of good that’s come to me since then stems from this reversal of opinion on surrender.
Surrender is the strongest, most subversive thing you can do in this world. It takes strength to admit you are weak, bravery to show you are vulnerable, courage to ask for help. It’s also not a one-time gig; you don’t just do it once and move on. It’s a way of existing, a balancing act. For me, it looks like this: I pick up the baton and I run as far as I can, and I hand it over when I’m out of breath. Or actually maybe it’s like: I’m running with the baton, but the Universe is holding on to the other half of it, and we have an agreement that I’ll figure out the parts I can and hand over the parts I can’t.
In his online course on spirituality and addiction, Father Richard puts it this way:
Until you move to the sense of being able to trust there is a God who is guiding you, who loves you more than you love yourself—that’s when you’ve made the transfer. That’s when you know you’re a part of a bigger flow, a bigger system—if you want to use that word—and you are not doing it, it is being done unto you. [2]
Whitaker continues her thoughts on the power of surrender:
Life no longer feels precarious, or about to crumble—even when it is, in fact, crumbling. By surrendering to whatever is unfolding and by accepting what is, by giving up on the outcome and allowing life to flow the way it’s meant to, by stepping out of your own way and letting the natural order take the lead, you not only get a break from the exhaustion of having to control everything, but you also get to experience life, instead of what you think life owes you. (Hint: What life wants to give us is infinitely better than what we think it owes us.)
References: [1] Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles (HarperPerennial: 1996), 12–13.
[2] Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: A Spiritual Study of the Twelve Steps (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2020), online course.
Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol (Dial Press: 2021), 158–160.
Passion is the supreme alchemical elixir, and renews all things
No-one can grow exhausted when passion is born, so don’t sigh heavily, your brows bleak with boredom and cynicism and despair— look for passion! passion! passion! passion!
Futile solutions deceive the force of passion.
They are banded to extort money through lies.
Marshy and stagnant water is no cure for thirst. No matter how limpid and delicious it might look, it will only stop and prevent you from looking for fresh rivers that could feed and make flourish a hundred gardens, just as each piece of false gold prevents you from recognizing real gold and where to find it.
False gold will only cut your feet and bind your wings, saying “I will remove your difficulties” when in fact it is only dregs and defeat in the robes of victory.
So run, my friends, run fast and furious from all false solutions. Let divine passion triumph, and rebirth you in yourself.
I will soon be posting a summary of all the wonderful and inspiring talks, panels, videos, etc. from the Bioneers conference last weekend on our Kinship Ray website blog (sri-kinship-ray.org). I have shared a couple of them here and this talk by Kenny Ausubel, co-founder of Bioneers just blew me away.
“… we are amazing mimics, and surely we can learn a riff or two from the symphony of life. But looking around at the dreadful state of the world, you have to wonder: Is there some deeper form of social biomimicry already in play that we’re not seeing?”
“Indeed, it’s slyly hiding in plain sight. You might call it the role of fraud in nature.”
Here’s a link to the transcript – well worth your time to read and enjoy:
“Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising. How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken. How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem. Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.”
Octavia E. Butler was an amazing writer of science fiction, a poet, and a seer. Her work is phenomenal both in its skill and its prescience. As far as I know, she coined the phrase: “God is Change” that I first read in one of her excellent books and that is the end of this profound poetry.
Earthseed by Octavia Butler
Here we are– Energy, Mass, Life, Shaping life, Mind, Shaping Mind God, Shaping God. Consider— We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.
His work is always profound. I love the line, “And happiness might just be a single step away…”
THE EDGE YOU CARRY WITH YOU
You know so very well the edge of darkness you have always carried with you.
You know so very well, your childhood legacy:
that particular, inherited sense of hurt, given to you so freely by the world you entered.
And you know too well by now
the body’s hesitation at the invitation to undo everything others seemed to want to make you learn.
But your edge of darkness has always made its own definition secretly as an edge of light
and the door you closed might, by its very nature be one just waiting to be leant against and opened.
And happiness might just be a single step away, on the other side of that next unhelpful and undeserving thought.
Your way home, understood now, not as an achievement, but as a giving up, a blessed undoing, an arrival in the body and a full rest in the give and take of the breath.
This living breathing body always waiting to greet you at the door, always prepared to give you the rest you need, always, no matter the long years away, still wanting you, to come home.
…
From ‘The Edge You Carry With You’ in ‘Still Possible’ David Whyte Many Rivers Press Dec 1st 2021 Available on Pre-order https://davidwhyte.com/collections/books-cards-and-audio/products/still-possible …
