A Friday walk around the ranch

I don’t know how this photo happened. It’s as if the clouds went swooping by, in a hurry to be somewhere.  It created a double exposure look without any editing on my part.

Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.

~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer

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Waiting for Dorian

Scene from a bike ride on Labor Day.

Whatever we are waiting for — peace of mind, contentment, grace, the inner awareness of simple abundance — it will surely come to us, but only when we are ready to receive it with an open and graceful heart.

~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you’ll never enjoy the sunshine.

~ Morris West

A Tuesday ramble

At the edge of dawn.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

~ Wendell Berry

The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common.
In healing the scattered members come together.
In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.

~ Wendell Berry, excerpt from What Are People For?: Essays (you can read more here)

Between

A moment, in-between.

The solid ground we once took refuge in has disintegrated underneath us, sending us into unknown territory.  We were so sure we were beyond breaking yet again, that we had finished with all that, but the beloved is not interested in maintaining the status quo.  It is the nature of all form to disintegrate, so that new forms may emerge.

Between the worlds, burning up, longing for an end to the contradictions.  We have found ourselves in the liminal, but how do we rest there?  Where is the healing, the transcendence, the resolution?  How could we be asked to surrender more?  It can seem that we are falling apart, but were we ever together to begin with?  Is that even the right lens from which to attempt navigation?  Or were we always something more whole, more majestic than all that?

Slow way down.  Breathe deeply from the lower belly.  Feel your feet in the mud of the earth.  Sink into the womb of now.  For just this moment, set aside the need to understand, to figure it all out, or to replace this moment with another.  Today may not be the day for answers, but to let your heart break open to the vastness of the question.

Look up into the new summer sky.  Something is longing to be born, in you, as you, as the poetry of your life and as the gifts you will share with others.  Lay your hands on your heart.  Listen.  Receive.  There are blues coming into existence that have never made their way into this dimension.  Oranges, reds, yellows, and purples that have been sent to remind you of the rarity and outrageousness of one human heart.  Stay right here.  Don’t move from this moment.  Open your senses.  Step into the mystery.  See through the veil.  Everything that has ever happened and everyone you have ever met, has led up to right here and now.  Trust in the fires of disintegration and renewal, and in the timeline that is written within the cells of your heart.

~ Matt Licata

Presence

In the morning, just before sunrise.

Presence is not an object.  It is the openness that beholds it all.

~ Joan Tollifson

A Monday Meander: Place

 

At sunrise.

To know a physical place you must become intimate with it. You must open yourself to its textures, its colours in varying day and night lights, its sonic dimensions. You must in some way become vulnerable to it. In the end, there’s little difference between growing into the love of a place and growing into the love of a person.

~ Barry Lopez

Sitting by the pond on a lovely day

As above.

I give thanks for arriving
Safely in a new dawn,
For the gifts of eyes
To see the world,
The gift of mind
To feel at home
In my life.
The waves of possibility
Breaking on the shore of dawn,
The harvest of the past
That awaits my hunger,
And all the furtherings
This new day will bring.

~John O’Donohue