 The Cosmic Cross is a Circle: In the Name of Love, Lover, and Loving...
"I can't breathe." -- George Floyd If these three words are not yet your essential mantra, what the hell is taking you so long? There is simply no way that anyone can have the least shred of an idea of awakening, or of faith, without an overhaul of their thinking mind: what have we been given consciousness for, if not for actual thought? The Holy Scriptures of the World have all been given to us with the smell and taste of blood in their pages: open your mouth and take a bite! "I can't breathe." You might not have realized this yet, but the Holy Scripture that really is of everlasting-importance is the one in which you are the author... writing it upon your heart... Your every breath matters! Gifted with this grace, you breathe your life which is also the very Breath of the Beloved, the Holy Mystery... in-flow, out-flow... you and the Divine are entwined in the Sacred Art of Breath... and it all happens naturally, and naturally, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you... This is the essential reality, the real Reality, that makes manifest the Love, Lover, and Loving... Do not forget this! The Four Directions of the Cosmic Cross rise from, and are entwined with, all of the manifest Universe: there is no separation, no part, not even the least particle or person, is in any way not connected with every other part or person. This is simply a cosmic-ontological and mystical fact, both... "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you" is Quantum Physics 101... it is also the most rEvolutionary thought and manifesto ever spoken or written! You say you don't like radical or socialist? Well, how about a through-and-through democracy? "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you" is the closest that we'll ever get to a Cosmic-Awakening-rEvolution! To the degree that any one part says, in his or her truth, "I can't breathe", then, in point of mystic-fact, we all lose an equal number of breaths! This is how the Universe is structured: we are all connected, and it matters not in the least if we like it or not: we are connected through the Umbilical Cord of Love, Lover, and Loving as a Child with Mother... This is Reality. This is Awakening! You can worship, you can praise, you can pray-yourself-silly, but if you do not love the one whom you can see, how can you say you love the One whom you cannot see? You can't! This is the Cross that we all carry... Racism. Gender inequality. Greed. Violence. Exploitation. Eco-cide. Oppression. Big Lies. You know the things that matter to all privilege and power... All of this (and obviously more) would have our rEvolutionary-possibilites stop right here: stop here with this corrupted sense that this is good enough! How incredibly self-serving this is of the powerful and privileged! It is precisely here that "I can't breathe" has its fullest meaning and power: "I can't breathe" is an anthem for everyone's liberation, even the liberation of the privileged and powerful! It is all of us or none of us: remember, there is no separation! It is right here that the Cosmic Cross most truly exists! If you have had doubt: doubt no more! You are needed to complete the Mystery of Love, Lover, and Loving! This core-truth is that the kingdom of God is here and lies all about us and can be seen and known by love -- and must be -- and then must be enacted with the same passion, unwavering intensity, and integrity as Mary and Christ did... conspire with the inner will of grace to change everything and to change everything utterly -- to transform the world and life in the world into a direct representation of God's love and God's justice... -- Andrew Harvey, Return of the Mother (To be continued...)
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 The Cosmic Cross is a Circle: In the Name of Love, Lover, and Loving...
Imagine the difference in the Christian faith, if all theology had started from, and built upon, the central Jesus' message of The Kingdom of Heaven is within you... From this change of mind foundation, everything would be different: wouldn't we read the Beatitudes different if we understood that they reflected the exact pathway into an awakening of the Kingdom within? Wouldn't everything be different if we understood Jesus as Way-Finder, instead of "Lord" or "Savior"? There is a story that deserves a brief re-telling... It goes something like this... Once upon a time there was a very old monastery with only six very old monks still alive and dwelling there... each one simply waiting to die... The remarkable days of their community had already passed some half-century earlier... Since then, vocations had dwindled until no one came knocking upon their door anymore... Except for the very old Rabbi of a very old village some few miles away, down in the valley... The Rabbi, who had at one time had climbed the mountain to the monastery several times a year to pay a friendly visit to the Abbot, now visited only once a year, riding on the back of a donkey... The old Abbot greeted the old Rabbi with a mutually tired embrace... The Rabbi said, "I am certain this will be my last visit to this Holy Ground, dear Brother. I'm afraid that I will be dead soon." The Abbot waited, and then replied, "Dear Brother, I am thinking that I will certainly die first! I am so tired and I fear so for this Community which is also near death." The Rabbi stood in silence for several minutes as the two old men looked into each other's eyes... until finally, he said, "It is true that I will be dead soon, but not before I tell you some very good news. I heard it myself in my morning prayer. I am certain it is true. Why would the Blessed One lie to me? It has been made known to me, and I am to tell you, that one of you holy monks is the Messiah!" The good Abbot was stunned, never thinking that his old friend the Rabbi was crazy enough to believe such a wild thought... He said, "That cannot be true! We are Christians! We believe that Jesus was the Chosen One!" "Ah, so you do" said the Rabbi. "Still, this is exactly what the Lord told me to tell you! There you have it. I've delivered His message. Can we please have a little bread and drink before I leave?" And so they did. And then the Rabbi, with Brother Michael's assistance, he sat upon his donkey, blessed his friends, and proceeded away... That evening, after community prayer, the Abbot told his brother monks what the Rabbi had said... together, they all shared a hearty laugh, "That dear old Rabbi! Bless his soul! One of us the Messiah! How silly that old saint is!" But then, and in the next few weeks, everything changed! Each of the six old monks became certain that it "just had to be brother so-and-so", and each began to see in the other the beautiful radiance of the Blessed One... They laughed often. They cried in wonder. And most of all, they really began to love one another! Oh, to be sure, they had always been respectful and kind, but the faults of all were an irritation, and the snoring! Someone or other was a violent wood-cutter! Now though, truly, heaven was at hand! A lone pilgrim happened upon the monastery and was received with such joy! The humble monks made him so happy, prayed for him, fed him, sheltered him, and when parting, encouraged to return if ever he happened to pass their way again... the pilgrim told the story to the bartender in the village and also to the barber... they both told a few others... and then... and then... well, everyone just had to go see for themselves... And as it surely turned out, six old monks who had suddenly seen in each other the Messiah, discovered the Rabbi was, after all, certainly right! But more! That Silly Messiah was now everywhere, in everyone, and in everything! Everyone, somehow, through the humble certainty of six old monks (and thanks be to God for the Rabbi), also knew it to be true: the Kingdom of Heaven is in everyone... and they finally, finally, after so many years of life, began to really live... And wouldn't you know, but one day, out of the blue, someone put up a sign in the town park... the sign didn't exactly point to any specific place, but everyone knew it was true...  Remember, Sweet Human, just how Sacred that You are!
Rev. Matthew Fox, in his extraordinary books (such as Original Blessing, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, and Creation Spirituality) has served to re-focus Christian spirituality and faith away from the seeming core fundamentalist idea of our human unworthiness (original sin and bare-bones salvation theology) and into a spirit of wholeness and essential goodness. Obviously, we still fall, slip, and trip into patterns of idiocy: especially when in pursuit of privilege, profits, and power... but truly, most of us are really quite love-able! The Christian mystic is steadily awakening into a transformation of her consciousness... which should, of course, be the goal of the Churches... In the intersection of Christianity, Eastern Religions, and Science (and I might as well add the Poets like Rumi, Hafiz, and Mary Oliver) Sacred Imagination is once again assuming its rightful place in the tool-box of the contemplative lifestyle... A minor resurgence of the bohemian-mind in the arts, fashion, and interiority of the young gives hope that loving one another is the name of the game... I'm sorry that I only copied the above photo and that it came with no identification of artist, but doesn't it capture Sacred Imagination at work -- and that work being-loving? If we are blessed, (or supremely lucky) our living comes with a maximum of pleasure: orgasmic, artistic, and personalistic: in an active and intentional community of friends. A model, often over-looked, is that of Jesus making wine for a celebration: there was no penance or depression in that scene! Every wedding celebration is innately sexual in orientation: everyone participates in the "secret knowing" and blessing of the sexual bliss upon the happy couple: Dance! Rejoice! Play! Sing! The unitive consciousness is again exploring possibilities... within you... within us! Along with many feminist thinkers / theologians / mystics, I no longer find it easy to re-late to the unitive consciousness as "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit". But, neither are other simplistic formulas "heart-grabbing"... While it is true that anything that we can say about "God" reveals the limitations of both insight and of language: wherein every "yes" is answered with responding and resounding "no"... It is also true that words are sign-posts of a hidden reality: this is especially true with Sacred Scripture and the poetry of the mystics... The Christian will think of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit... the Hindu will think Being, Consciousness, and Bliss... the Scientist might think, What if? Why not? and What next? And the mystic, of whatever faith, is as likely as not, thinking Love, Lover, and Loving... The Cosmic Cross is a Circle: In the Name of Love, Lover, and Loving: this is the Be Love Now insight of Ram Dass, of the bohemian youth, and of the awakening mystic... The Old Religions have brought this precious blue Planet to its knees with their systems of domination, their economics of exploitation, and their politics of power: they all need to cultivate, once more, the grace of awakening: and they need your example and your insistence! Why else would anyone want to awaken, if not for serving the other? How could anyone awaken if there are still others? Awakening is your surrender into the adoration of the Unitive: Being, Consciousness, Bliss... In the Name of Love, Lover, and Loving... The task of a liberated person is not to scold the world and preach to it but to delight it back to its senses. -- Alan Watts It is as if Jesus, somewhere along the line, read the Tao Te Ching of LaoTzu: at the very least, a Holy Breeze carried its essential scent to him, because he breathed it deep, and summarized it with these everlasting words: The Kingdom of Heaven is within you! Whoa! Isn't it up there? Isn't it after I die? Don't I need first to be saved? Not according to Jesus! Remember the Beatitudes? Blessed are you... Jesus presents the Tao, a Path-Way meant for our feet to walk, skip, jump, dance, or run into your bliss... your awakening... The Kingdom of God is within you! Ah, so... (To be continued...)  Each heart should be a small garden.
It should be cleared of weeds and be full of wonderful plants and flowers. -- St. Alexandra Fedorovna Tao, Way, Path that We Must Walk to Thrive... The Tao has any number of that which might be described as core teachings, and being a prime example of wisdom literature, these core teachings cross every philosophical and religious divide with such pithy guidance as, Embrace simplicity. Put others first. Desire little. (19 tr. John H. McDonald) No wonder then that the American philosophers Emerson and Thoreau and poet Walt Whitman deeply admired the great sage from ancient China... And on into the '60's and '70's and the Tao Te Ching criss-crossed America with the young hippie generation as they hitch-hiked the highways and byways of the country, carrying the Tao in backpacks and pockets... If there is one theme of the Tao that connects with Quantum Physics it would be that of the awareness of the unitive consciousness (more on this later), suffice to say now that everything flows... now a particle of possibility, and now a wave... both determined by the observing mind... behind / within every manifestation of both being-ness and matter, there is only the Unitive Consciousness... Flow would be the key word and concept: energy moves... minds meld... both awaken into possibilities... and both flow... Tao is Grandmother to God... Intention and action introduce the Unitive Consciousness into one's life... We cultivate our intention by practices common to every religion: we pray, we learn silent-mind, we surrender, and we adore: from this daily practice flows action: we put every other first (until we realize there are no others), we serve, we feed, and we love... This is meant to become a life-style! This is meant to become the uniform with which we dress every day! This is meant to become the energy with which we flow throughout our daily lives! All of this supports and encourages the slow-motion process of changing our minds! We pray: we pray because we doubt everything: we doubt the Tao, we doubt any so-called "Unitive Consciousness", just as we doubt any sort of "God"... and it is just as likely that we pray because we just had the best orgasm of our lives! It's all good... precisely because we have to start somewhere, right? And so a collection of prayers (used prayers are for sale in every bookstore) is real good: Whispers from Eternity by Paramahansa Yogananda has traveled with me for years (I first read it in a public library in California when I was in High School)... Celtic Daily Prayer by the Northumbrian Community and the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer can assist in establishing a certain rhythm to your daily prayer: especially as a spring-board for writing your own Prayer Book... One really can't jump into silent-mind without first the clearing of weeds, so that our garden is made ready for cultivation... Now, as to the clearing of weeds, you gotta realize that your old mind just won't due! If transformation is the purpose of cultivating the grace of awakening, then well, let's just Name It: we have to learn how to put on the mind of Christ... But that, after all, is the "rub", is it not? The hardest thing that we all have to do is this: it isn't putting on the mind of Christ, rather, it is the acceptance of our humanity: the very Real Reality that Christ came to embrace: not save, surely... not redeem or forgive... but to embrace, to cherish, to adore, and to love: this is the task of the spiritual life, of the Gospel, of the Tao: to remember, to remember Sweet Human, just how sacred that you are... It is only in this, that we enter the Mind of Christ... (To be continued...)  O Living Flame of Love
O living flame of love you that tenderly wound the deepest center of my soul! Since you are no longer harsh, please complete your task: rend the veil of this sweet encounter! -- St. John of the Cross (tr. Stanley Appelbaum) What are the fundamental desires of every human being? Aren't they happiness, health, safety, and the feeling / knowing of being wanted? This fundamentalism is the only place to start in considering the ingredients for cultivating the grace of awakening... quite obviously, one needs a certain amount of creative leisure in order to make any sort of sustainable progress in this spiritual direction... so, wouldn't you add creative leisure to the list of fundamental human desires? If we now have, perhaps, agreed upon five fundamental human desires, does it make sense to re-frame these desires as the conditions required for any human being to thrive? Recognizing these conditions not only allows for the human being to thrive, but also to wonder, ponder, question, seek, and engage in natural contemplation... The Tao Te Ching of LaoTzu is perhaps the fruit of centuries of natural contemplation by the sages and mystics of ancient China: and also a fruit still very edifying and useful for every 21st century person hungry for thriving... There is nothing small or lesser in regards to natural contemplation: it is not only the ground upon which the edifice of a spiritual life is raised, but it is at the very same time, the natural end of the contemplative life: there is no genuine separation between "spiritual" and the "mundane", between the "divine life" and the so-called "ordinary life"... For many this can be confusing, but "satisfaction" can be "satisfied" in this subtle "no difference"... In any case, we all can only begin exactly where we are... It is of no advantage to imitate a monk or nun, or an ascetic or other-worldy-penitent, if one is not specifically called to be or to live as one... Natural contemplation is the humble grace of receiving the pleasant "knowledge" of always being good enough... Good enough to care, to engage, to practice kindness and justice, and to enjoy the natural sweetness of the now and place of one's life: good food, good work, good friends, good questions, good conversations, good pleasures, and good times with one's lover... Gratitude is the bridge between the human, the human community, and the ponderific-possibility of some sort of Transcendental Consciousness behind or even in-filling all of Creation... This transcendental consciousness is unknowable and un-nameable: although as is our wont, we do name (and obviously kill) because of it... LaoTzu was right, though, in simply calling it Tao... or Way... or Path that We Must Walk to Thrive... But, for right now and right here, we'll keep to our purpose in cultivating the grace of awakening... (To be continued...)  Allowing an Awakening
Contentedly cultivate harmony and elegance... wherein the "I" simply, and quite naturally, dissolves into the Divine Pregnancy... The more that is both the inspiration and the curse of our separated human condition requires a nonviolent, yet direct, confrontation: it is not simply because more is killing the Planet, but let's face it, we are not happy. We are not content. We are not even matching the hope of dandelions... We are in need of different... What are the latest fashions? Until "fashion" cycles back to cover-alls, who cares? What is the latest gadget has long-since been surplanted by a stream of I-Phones... The world-wide-web, while serving at least one useful purpose, cannot open the door to your secret heart... and it is here, in your heart-mind, that your real life begins, ends, and renews in bliss... Without a crash course in either or both quantum physics or mysticism, you'll have to trust someone that the single word, the impossibly pregnant beauty, of namaste is the secret of the Universe... While it is quantum-truth that everything is a "cluster" of varying vibrations, informed, by Intelligence, it is also a mystic-truth that there is only one suitable or sufficient response to this... it is namaste... (nahm-us-teh)... The Divine in me adores the Divine in you... The Divine in me adores the Divine in Everyone... The Divine in me adores the Divine in Everything... The Divine in us adores the Divine in Global Beauty, Compassion, Equality, Justice, Service, and Peace... Alan Watts wrote: "The task of a liberated person is not to scold the world and preach to it but to delight it back to its senses." Delight it back to its senses is namaste in loving action: a stance taken up daily in, about, and through one's everyday life: cultivate harmony (being kind, just, and peaceful) and elegance (natural, beauty, humor) that the little self will, in the natural course of living, will, without fan-fare, dissolve into the Real Reality, the ever-present, Divine Pregnancy... And obviously, if you still don't understand, pick up a copy of the Gospel of Jesus: look up the Beatitudes and Parable of the Last Judgement (Matthew 5: 1 - 11 and 25: 31 - 46); read the Tao Te Ching by LaoTzu (tr. John H. McDonald); read the Bhagavad Gita (tr. Eknath Easwaran); read Rumi The Big Red Book (tr. Coleman Barks); read The Illuminated Hafiz (Green, Barks, Bly); and read A Global Ethic (Declaration of the Parliament of the World's Religions)... Beatitude means blessing, happy, beautiful one, and welcome home from among other similar ideas... Beatitude is the Jesus-Way of namaste... Beatitude is the smile of the Buddha... Beatitude is the contented harmony of LaoTzu... Beatitude is the bliss of the whirling dance of both Sufi and Planet Earth... Beatitude is the subtle vibration of breath flowing as a river of life, into and through you... Beatitude is Being-Consciousness-Bliss and your response of loving adoration... And our practice is right under our feet: in the here of your where-ever... You begin, simply begin, with an invocation to Sacred Imagination (what would Paradise look like? How would everyone act and live in your Paradise? Then you practice...) You practice beauty: cultivate intention, contemplation, and compassion: expand your Sacred Imagination: embrace wider circles (who is left out? Who is left behind?) Namaste is your breath... namaste is the way in which you walk... namaste is the food on your plate... namaste is the compassion that you build, serve, and give... Ram Dass wrote: "We are all just walking each other home." This is the most fundamental awakening that we are allowed...  Allowing an Awakening
Reality or Unreal? True self or False self? Meaning and Purpose or an Indifferent Universe? Can the real you either stand up or sit down? Does this matter? Who cares? I think it probable that most people, at one time or another dabble with questions such as these, and I suppose in one way or another they all boil down to God or No God... As I tend toward the inevitable end of my life, these questions along with every conceivable answer themselves become relative: the questions asked by a socially-constructed-self will always reach conclusions which are likewise, socially-constructed... in a self-perpetuating circle of both falsehood and obedience... Long ago when I felt called to become a monk, I intuited that I would have impossible problems with obedience... so I took a different path: into the Catholic Worker Movement... a Soup Kitchen allowed for creative flexibility: I could be different with ease... Still, that very ease was another socially-constructed-self! The "system" has always allowed for the different and weird: on the margins, unable to really or significantly affect culture... The Catholic Worker Movement proves the point: small, dedicated, bands open Soup Kitchens, Houses of Hospitality, print newspapers, etc. for years and years: Dorothy Day is likely to be declared a saint: and the system remains entrenched in privilege, profits, and power... consumerism is eating the Planet alive... and the churches are still in business... There has to be another way! (And there is!) The one work we should rightly undertake is eradication of the self. Could you completely forget yourself, even for just an instant, you would be given everything. -- Meister Eckhart Of course, Eckhart is writing about the socially-constructed-self: the illusion that somehow we are separate from everything else in the Universe... We give the greater portion of our lives over to building our tower of independence: in quiet servitude of the systems of domination that have only one purpose, to mold us into happy little consumers and producers, soldiers and prostitutes, gleefully wrapped in a national flag, and as if drunk, clinging to a religion of salvation from a world we are destroying... In the movie Dr. Strange, two wise women book-end the story, the first with this seemingly off-hand comment, "Steven, everything is about you." The second, the Ancient One, tells the same "It's not about you." Mystics of every faith (and of no particular faith) have long understood this -- by the sincerity of their practices: all pointing to the very same goal: getting out of the way: allowing for an awakening into the Really Real... That Saint Angela of Foligno could write "The world is pregnant with God" interests few... until now... Philosopher and systems scientist, Ervin Laszlo, has summarized his studies in quantum physics with "Eight Cardinal Propositions": only two of which I'll reference here. The first is The cosmos is an infinite and eternal intelligence. And the second, The ultimate purpose of human existence is to consciously foster and further the transmission of the unifying, embracing, and all-encompassing intelligence of the cosmos into the universe... Words confuse or deceive, but free from the desire to manipulate, Lao-Tzu compiled the essence of the Tao which convey a way of life increasingly disinterested in artifice and instead, contentedly cultivates harmony and elegance, wherein the "I" simply, and quite naturally, dissolves into the Divine Pregnancy... Turning once again to Meister Eckhart, we discover: What does God do all day long? He gives birth. From the beginning of eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth to the All... This Unconditioned Nature is without duality... Let me repeat: Unconditioned Nature is without duality. The "I" is like a shirt: we put it on, we take it off: we are child, youth, adult: we think this, we think that: we want this, we don't want that: clinging to the ego "I" of this and that, of now and then, and of me and mine is the deception that drives the suffering of the world... and all the while, on just the other side of despair, the Sun rises... Dr. Laszlo merely articulates in language most useful for today's world, the eternal wisdom of the forest academies, of the desert caves, and hidden lofts of the mystics: the scientists of Ultimate Reality. Quarks are beyond our perception: so is truth: so, as we have been taught, we construct... while deconstruction in order to truly live is the Tao, the Buddha, and the Beatitude of the Christ Consciousness... The Hindu sages intuited that the Real Reality could best be described as Being-Consciousness-Bliss... If you really feel the need for an "I"... this is It... as for the rest, practice stepping aside, which is, after all, simply allowing for an awakening... (More?)  Allowing an Awakening...
Increasingly, it seems to me, the so-called spiritual life is, before all else, the choice to get out of the way... Women, men, youth, and children alike are supposedly about the core work of self-identification: learning to recognize "I" is just the beginning. After "I" comes a cosmic catalogue of differences: me from you, me from every "other", me wanting safety, me wanting you... and on and on... into school (what shall we learn today, children?)... into... and into... We live in a social construct of separation, reinforced by both religion and science... And, to what end the philosopher among us might ask? Recognizing the reality of this social construct of separation is the first step in the only essential separation: you from all the systems of separation that dominate, manipulate, and extract from you your genuine identity... Realizing that you are the other in this system of separation can be scary... discovering both how to think and what should you now think about is both liberation and difference-making... Think like a Buddha or dance like a Christ is not normal... Normality is the goal of the "system": if you are normal, you will believe the collective myths: you will join a productive business model: you will contribute to society: you will say very little about bad subjects: such as war, violence, addictions to both, racism, sexism, every known social phobia, and the like... Normal is going along to get along... it's what everybody does... It's about my survival, man... Luckily for me, I had a gateway into abnormality: a cultural shift moved just enough for a crack in the wall of separation to appear... the short version of this shift would be the single word hippie... tack on the Beatles, Dylan, Joan Baez, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Vietnam War, and for a brief moment there was the legend of a movement... The longer version would add the arrival of Swami Vivikananda in the United States in 1898 and Paramahansa Yogananda some years later, but to be honest, one mustn't forget the Transcendentalist philosophers like Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau... and poet Walt Whitman: ee-gadz, where would we be without Whitman? And the Beats and Buddhism? Have you read The Dharma Bums by Kerouac or Siddhartha by Hesse? In the fifties and the sixties the West finally awoke to the East: but still, the social construct of separation overcame... Hippie could be bought and sold: much like today's bohemian style: hippie and bohemian instead, mean Salvation Army counters (Leonard Cohen, Suzanne): at best, simple living, at worst, rugged poverty and soup lines... The system sustains poverty because it is a reminder: poverty serves the purpose of handjobs for separation... purposeful pleasure for complete domination... Okay... One cannot awaken and at the very same time remain asleep (Alan Watts!) The "I" that we so earnestly develop and sustain is only, at it's very best, a vapid summation of going along to get along... Salvation theology is the big-seller in this market... But if you have even the barest inkling that there could be more to the story, you've got to get to work: you are the one who has to write the story! And man, the story is not about separation! LSD and pot and gurus may have helped hippies to see through the cracks in the wall, but the only way through is that of allowing an awakening... To be continued...  Rumi, the Ecstatic
Listen to the silence in these words... "God In The Stew" Is there a human mouth that does not give out soul sound? Is there love, a drawing together of any kind, that is not sacred? Every natural dog sniffs God in the stew... ... Millions of love-tents bloom on the plain. A star in your chest says, None of this is outside you. Close your lips and let the maker of mouths talk, the one who says things. --Rumi (tr. Coleman Barks) God in the stew is the secret sauce... the inescapable One Love Consciousness that is always breathing down our necks... if you haven't felt this already, wake up! It isn't at all that time is short. Rather, it's all about how sacred time is! I mean, you are breathing aren't you: if that isn't cause for radical amazement, what else is? Okay, a fine looking body is walking in front of you, then turning and glancing your way, is surely cause for some sort of dance, is it not? So, go ahead. Ask her if she would like a cup of tea in that passing shop... I mean, she just might say "yes"... surely, if this were your last breath, wouldn't you want it saying something quite extraordinary? Living like this, with subtle intention on the tip of your tongue, might soon have you spinning out poems like Rumi... or walking like the Christ, across the lake... there is no short-cut to where you really want to go... The friend walks by, and bricks in the wall feel conscious. Infertile women give birth. Beauty embodies itself. Those who know the taste of a meal are those who sit at the table and eat. --Rumi (tr. Coleman Barks) Lex Hixon wrote: "This planet is at the very apex of spiritual possibility." It doesn't matter if you know of Lex Hixon or not: but what he wrote is true... He also wrote: "Look down at your body. It is composed of light. It is composed of love." The What If? Before the Big Bang followed that First Thought with a second, Why Not? So here we are, but not just here: we are alive at the nexus of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity: What Next? How you live is, perhaps, the answer the Holy One is seeking... so, you better damn well live like you know: God Is In The Stew!  Poet, Ernesto Cardenal
"What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows. Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen." -- Thomas Merton Poet, Ernesto Cardenal was a friend of Thomas Merton. Cardenal wrote often about injustice: he listened to the cries of the poor... Merton, as a Trappist monk, living in Kentucky, listened as well: he too, heard the cries all about him: racism and war, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War... both poets, raged for peace: for an end to all of the completely unnecessary violence and cruelty that, both then and now, underpins the supposed "modern" world... but more, they embraced life, love, and the beauty around them... Poets are required to listen, like monks... But, in point of fact, every human being is likewise required to listen... Most of us give the first nine months of our lives over to listening: we listen to our Momma's heart... we listen to the flow of her blood... we listen to the wonder of her orgasms... and this is just our beginning... Sadly, for most of us, we are seldom reminded as we grow to listen, to listen intently, excepting for the angry scold hurled our way... If we are profoundly lucky, though, the home in which we are raised is a place of safety for us, a place for books and music, and a place touched with reverence for all those things that enlarge our hearts with gratitude... To listen deeply is also the beginning of true sight. Sight and the reception of sound are connected: together they are music, the voice of earth, sky, sun, moon, and stars... as has now been recorded, the Earth sings in motion as it spins and propels through space... The poets' task is to write upon her / his heart: to impregnate the mind with a vivid perception, not judgment, and an openness of pure receptivity: into this is... Is-ness is beauty. Is-ness is truth. Is-ness is being... Here are a few lines from Reedgrass by Olav H. Hauge: A waterfall stumbles down its cliffside, the mountain shivers above the sheltered valley... concluding with: By the estuary reedgrass trembles, empty seed-heads bending toward shore. Is-ness is an invitation... This thought of an invitation reminds me of a line of Rumi's (as translated by poet Coleman Barks): The way you make love is how God will be with you... Now this is the purest of poetry: it is a startling invitation to live truly, deeply, meaningfully, and beautifully: in complete identification and surrender to Is... I Am is everywhere... I Am is the Poet... We are mirrors and pages... Who's in your mirror? What is on your page? |
AuthorRobert Daniel Smith was privileged to serve the homeless and marginalized for 30 years in California. He is living now almost within shouting distance of the Twin Cities. He is a poet, artist, writer, and long-time Companion of the Way still dreaming... Archives
May 2022
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