The wisdom

Hanging around in the woods.

Nothing can be loved at speed, and I think we might be looking at the loss of love in the world due to the increased velocity of ordinary life; the loss of care, skill and attention enough to ensure the health and happiness of each other and the planet earth. It is a baffling problem and governments seem unable to recognize it, or do much about it at present. To put it as a bleak modern metaphor, there may be moments when we feel we are all aboard an airliner being flown into a mountainside by the unstoppable forces of an incomprehensible madness. Now seems like a good time to talk about spirituality, art and innocence.

~ Michael Leunig, When I Talk to You

Oh, the joy

New blooms.

Healing does not require that you master the unreasonable side of your reason. Nor does healing require inner perfection of any order. A common trait shared by people who have healed is that they cease being unreasonable in ways that no longer matter in the greater scheme of life. Against the scale of life or death, how important is winning an argument? How important is holding a grudge? How important is anything other than how well we love others, how deeply we regard the value of the gift of life, and what we do with our life that makes this world a better place?

~ Caroline Myss

I believe our survival demands revolution, both cultural and political. If we are to survive the disasters that threaten, and survive our own struggle to make it new – a struggle I believe we have no choice but to commit ourselves to – we need tremendous transfusions of imaginative energy. If it is indeed revolution we are moving toward, we need life, and abundantly – we need poems of the spirit, to inform us of the essential, to help us live the revolution. And if instead it be the Last Days – then we need to taste the dearest, freshest drops before we die – why bother with anything less than that, the essential?

~ Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World

Beautiful acts

Hints of a season to come.

Look closely. The beautiful may be small.

~ Immanuel Kant

A Monday meander: Checking in on the word for the year

A flame in the flower garden.

Like a caring mother
holding and guarding the life
of her only child,
so with a boundless heart
of lovingkindness,
hold yourself and all beings
as your beloved children.

~ Gautama Buddha

A Monday meander: Words

A week or so ago.

It is only through letting our heart break that we discover something unexpected: the heart cannot actually break–it can only break open. To live with an open heart is to experience life full-strength.

~John Welwood

14. In the morning light

Morning shimmers and shines.

Mind is very cunning; it is never simple.  The heart is never cunning; it is always simple.  To be simple means shifting from the head to the heart.

We live through the head.  That’s why our life becomes more and more complicated, more and more like a jigsaw puzzle.  Nothing seems to fit.  And the more we try to be clever, the more in a mess we are.  That has been our history: We have gone more and more insane.  Now the whole earth is almost like a madhouse.  The time has come, if humanity is to survive at all, for a great shift to happen: We have to move from the head to the heart.  Otherwise, the head is ready to commit suicide.  It has created so much misery and so much boredom and so many problems that suicide seems the only way out.  The whole earth is preparing for suicide.  It is going to be a global suicide, unless a miracle happens.

And this is going to be the miracle — if it happens, this is the miracle — there will be a great shift, a radical change, in our very outlook: We will start living from the heart.  We will drop the whole universe of the mind, and we will start afresh like small children.

Live from the heart.  Feel more, think less, be more sensitive and less logical.  Be more and more heartful, and your life will become sheer joy.

~ Osho, Everyday Osho, Day 92

A Monday Meander

Leaning towards each other in the stormy light.

 

The typical, well-meaning liberal approach to solving social tensions is to treat every value as equal, and then try to force a leveling or redistribution of resources (money, rights, goods, land) while leaving the values untouched. The typical conservative approach is take its particular values and try to foist them on everybody else. The developmental approach is to realize that there are many different values and worldviews; that some are more complex than others; that many of the problems at one stage of development can only be defused by evolving to a higher level; and that only by recognizing and facilitating this evolution can social justice be finally served.

~ Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciusness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy