Smoke on the water

Sign of the times.

History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality – if only for an instant – by means of creation.

~ Octavio Paz

I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep…. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

~ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

A Monday meander: Community

On the anniversary of my mother’s death (09/09), a sunset.

What if our religion was each other. If our practice was our life. If prayer, our words. What if the temple was the Earth. If forests were our church. If holy water–the rivers, lakes, and ocean. What if meditation was our relationships. If the teacher was life. If wisdom was self-knowledge. If love was the center of our being.”

~ Ganga White

Starting with a sunset

Yesterday’s sunset as seen from here on the ranch.

Before change can happen, a clear choice must be made.  I believe we all have the freedom to choose the direction of our lives and the values we stand for.  We have only to embrace our beliefs at a deep level and our path of change will open.  Profound change begins in the heart.  From the moment we embrace the clear intention for change, each of us according to our individual natures is inspired to act in a way to bring about a healthy and benign outcome.  All life will conspire to bring this about.  If enough of us decide to make the change, to surrender ourselves to it, transformation will happen.  I have faith in our capacity, as beings of love, to transcend the challenges we face on Earth, should we choose to.

~ Ranchor Prime, The Eight Elements

Where to start?

A sunrise.

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.

~ G. K. Chesterton

A Saturday saunter: Morning

While the moon was waning.

Take the whole teatime just to drink your tea. I started doing this in airports. Instead of reading, I sit there and look at everything, and appreciate it. Even if you don’t feel appreciation, just look. Feel what you feel; take an interest and be curious. Write less; don’t try to capture it all on paper. Sometimes writing, instead of being a fresh take, is like trying to catch something and nail it down. This capturing blinds us and there’s no fresh outlook, no wide-open eyes, no curiosity.

~ Pema Chodron

A Monday meander: Life in the Bogs

Perched for a moment.

Dragonflies are reminders that we are light and we can reflect light in powerful ways if we choose to do so.

~ Robyn Nola

We speak of things “catching our gaze,” “calling our attention,” “grabbing our focus,” and those are all quite precise ways of speaking, because as we’re wandering the world, things solicit our attention, draw us into dialog, a kind of conversation without words. A fallen leaf on the ground calls my attention, and so I slow down to stop and gaze at it. And so, in my experience, this leaf is not dead, though it’s been lying on the ground for days. It has its own agency. It has its own power, its potency. And so, it is with everything we experience.

~ David Abrams, The Ecology of Perception, Emergence Magazine

A morning walk

Out the back door, near sunrise.

Today is sacred – for it will never come again. What could be more important than living this day with attention and the intention to be of benefit, to the best of your ability, to all you encounter?

~ John Bruna

In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them…it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.

~ M.F.K. Fisher