Because

Me and my solar eclipse shadows.

A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.
― Coco Chanel

Another month rolls by

From the past (and a glimpse of the future).

“When we dance the earth trembles. When our steps fall on the earth we feel the shudder of life beneath us, and the earth feels the beating of our hearts, and we become one with the earth. We shall not sever ourselves from the earth. We must chant our being, and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth. We must keep the earth.”

― N. Scott Momaday, Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land

A Monday meander: In my art studio

Beginning with a circle

Remember who you were before the world told you who to be.

– Charles Bukowski

Oscar Wilde said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. Art is one of those things. Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you to play, explore, and test without attachment to results.

― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Watery thoughts and questions

A pool of light in a dark swamp. (Reflections.)

Water has great generosity and humility. It insists on no particular shape. It takes on the shape of whatever contains it: jug, stream, well, river, lake, ocean, tears, rain, mist or moisture. In this sense water holds a wonderful imaginative invitation in it.

The imagination is always drawn to the hidden form of things. Through its patience it coaxes the form to emerge.

….

… the imagination is a faculty that is oblique and indirect. It works to discover the forms of perception and possibility that we need for our journey. Imagination attends to the great flow of life, and in this way it elicits the form of one’s identity as it emerges from the matrix of one’s experience.

text excerpted from © The Four Elements, John O’Donohue (2010, Transworld Ireland, pp 45-46)

What are you scared of?

Entering the cave.  Mixed media on paper.

Meanwhile, at the edge of consciousness, we sense a kind of absence. It is not easy to articulate, but it carries its own dark middle-of-the-night fear, its own harrowing. It’s the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don’t even know how to perceive. We sense it when we worry that we cannot stem the flow of our materialism. We sense it when the pull of our smartphones feels a lot like an addiction. We sense it when we realise that our lives are lived in the controlled climate of air conditioning, but we still don’t want to feel the weather outside.

~ Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

The Cosmos is filled with precious gems. Each moment you are alive is a gem, shining through and containing earth and sky, water and clouds. It needs you to breathe gently for the miracles to be displayed. Suddenly you hear the birds singing, the pines chanting, see the flowers blooming, the blue sky, the white clouds… We should enjoy our happiness and offer it to everyone. Cherish this very moment… Let go of distress and embrace Life fully in your arms.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

A few prompts behind

At the start of the day.

As we apprentice ourselves to the way of nature, we begin to understand that all of life is in a continuous cycle of giving and receiving. It is the honoring of this cycle that makes us feel at home in ourselves and in relation to the rest of nature.

~ Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

Many of us feel that longing to return, for a spiritual homecoming. This is not a return to some imaginary past when America was great. It is a return to a relationship with the holy and the wild that echoes the intimacy our ancestors knew, but also heals the wounds that severed us from the rest of our human and more-than-human kinfolk in the first place.

We re-member ourselves back into sacred relationship by responding with an open heart to the Holy Wild who calls us back into communion. It may feel like a series of odd synchronicities — a small bird who lands on the railing close to you and looks you straight in the eye for an instant, a sense of welcoming you can’t explain nor deny when you slow down on your daily walk and notice the saplings and crows as individual beings, or a feeling of being witnessed by other people who are walking a similar path of return.

~ from the Center For Wild Spirituality newsletter

A Monday meander: Understanding

Relaxing by the woodstove.  (Izzy)

Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.

~James Herriot, James Herriot’s Cat Stories

I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.

~ Eckhart Tolle