Category Archives: heart whisperer

embracing life in all its messy glory

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the dream bus

To believe we control the movement of life is to believe we are driving a bus on which we are merely passengers. We feel as if we are in control when the bus takes us where we want to go, but when it keeps chugging merrily on its way despite our attempts to turn or stop or slow down, we are incredulous. We grip the frozen steering wheel and stare helplessly out the windows muttering that teenagers shouldn’t be having babies, corporations shouldn’t be exploiting legal loopholes for profit, and a cure for cancer should have been discovered by now.

Life asks many things of us, but suffering for our delusions isn’t one of them. The biggest delusion is that life should unfold in ways that make us happy. Since we weren’t even around when life began, our happiness could hardly have been a bullet point in its mission statement. Finding happiness is our job, and there’s more of it to be found when we meet life with open arms rather than with a fistful of angry questions. 

~ John Ptacek – from Reality Check

I love John’s honest wisdom-wordsmithing. Find more at his website: On Second Thought

Image source

be secluded and silent

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Another year approaches its use-by date and I am moved to thank each one of you for your interest in this little blog over the past year. Your company on the Way is cherished.

May your holiday season be joyful and safe.
May the New Year bring untold gracious blessings.
May you be always anchored in the unborn, undying Light.
May Love be your only guide, and may you know deep abiding contentment.

I see the candle, the face, the eye,
an altar where the soul bows,
a gladness and refuge.

My loving says, “Here – I can leave
my personality here,”
My reason agrees! “How can I object
when a rose makes the bent backs
stand up like cypresses?”
Such surrender changes everything.

Be secluded and silent. Stay in
the delight, and be brought the cup
that will come. No artfulness.
Practice quiet and this new joy.

~ Rumi

Image –  miriam louisa simons, Rose:  painting on Duppion silk, 100cm x 100cm

sinking back into just this

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just this……in all its simplicity……
welcoming what is here already……
not coming……not going……
obscured even by seeking……

So we meet in the paradox of apparent teachings, retreats, trainings or gatherings, to celebrate and explore this nameless presence that we are. At first, there is the tendency to accentuate the myriad of practices the yoga tradition has developed, to focus on concepts like nondual, true nature, awareness, self-inquiry or other-inquiry.

But all this activity eventually leads us to a giving up. And in this surrender what is revealed is seen to be what has always been here, before the search began, during its full intensity and after its cessation. The task turns out to be ceding to stillness, and in that stillness the recognition of just this.

Falling back and resting in what is so familiar that it has been overlooked during all the body sensing yoga, during all the pranayama, all the yoga nidra and amidst all the dialogues, amidst life itself, we find our self simply sinking back into just this.

~ Joan Ruvinsky

Gratitude to Kathleen Knipp for introducing me to Joan Ruvisky’s work and recommending her for our wideawake women page. “Her teachings, offered in both prose and poetry, as well as verbally, are yet another beautiful expression of the inexpressible through a woman’s voice.”
~ ml

today I light candles

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today I light candles …

my heart sings with gratitude
to all of you
~ Beloveds ~
who have been sending your prayers
and healing magic
my way
this past week or so

and I invite you to join me
in this outpouring of gratitude
by thinking of dear ones who have likewise
showered you with kind thoughts and deeds

you can light a gratitude candle
for them
via this little link

♥
with bowed head
and happy, healthy (!) heart
I thank you all
♥

~ miriam louisa

Image:  Bill Viola  -  Catherine’s Room

and here you are, shining: so dopily simple!

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If we meet this world unprotected, our heart gets broken over and over and over.

This is actually a gift.

You let the world touch you, it shatters you open, and it shatters you open, and it shatters you open.

And here you are, shining.

After our heart is broken open a thousand times and all of the contents emptied out, there’s just this shining left.

and btw

This is so dopily simple … SO dopily simple.

What are all the long books about?  All the fancy words and all of us getting ourselves tied up in knots.

It’s just simple.  Let’s just be here.  And when we’re here, let’s just invite our whole beings here, every bit.

And then when every bit is here, let’s invite everybody else here.

That’s it … end of story.  We’re already present.

What’s the big whoop?  Where do we think we’re going?

~ Jeannie Zandi

~  a   m   e   n  ~

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love’s the ultimate sly squatter

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how could it come to pass that halfway
through my sixty-eighth orbit of the sun
Love
would find me?

how, when I was without need
or hunger or even a shy dream that
Love
might find me?

perhaps Love, like me, is a homeless vagrant;
like a mysterious night moth,
It seeks out the empty, glowing
innocent heart
and quietly moves in

emelle says:
Love’s the ultimate sly squatter

~ miriam louisa

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I want to die comforting someone

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Mags Deane has kindly given me permission to repost this jewel – which touched me to the quick – from her blog.  In the post, called Tenderized Heart, she writes:

This is one of my favorite pieces of writing, from Jeannie Zandi.

I like to come to it when my heart is looking for some softening.

May we live for this dear hearts.

There is nothing between you and I.  My heart is tenderized to the extent that when your pain rises, I feel it in my chest, and there’s simply this love that doesn’t have a two.  Because that extra one, that “me” and “mine”, is over, it went when the will was broken by life’s refusal to do it “my” way.  So there’s no longer anything between us.

In that, this love rises that knows the beauty and the heartbreak of our shared humanness, the heights we can soar to, the depths we can sink to, the heartbreak that we must bear because we often cannot embody what our hearts wish to embody in all its beauty and perfection, the love that we are and have the potential to express.  We long to be love in every cell and we fail so miserably, and it hurts us to the core.  We’re so beautiful, and so brave, and so screwed.  We can’t get away from the unconscious aspects of ourselves and we can’t commit ourselves entirely to the dungeon.  We are all crucified on that cross of humanness.

And for this there is such a rising of compassion and mercy in the empty heart that has taken that crucifixion to the end, such a sweetness and a desire to give whatever kindness or assistance one can to these brave and beautiful creatures – you as a servant are born.  And then God moves us deeply to see that everyone is not only Her creation for me to give myself to, everyone is actually Her.  The feeling rises that says anything I have I will give you, oh brave children of God, oh sweet faces of Her.

I could never repay the debt I have to the Beloved for the gift of being allowed to see Her face, to see that everyone has always been Her, and that I’ve spent years treating them and myself, which is Her, as objects or enemies, or merely walked by so many in need or failed to look upon Her face with the love that is so obviously due Her.  What was I doing?  What was I thinking? As Donovan sang in Brother Sun, Sister Moon, “preoccupied with selfish misery”.  That’s what I was doing.

And an awareness of every moment of this selfish obliviousness is there, alongside the clear sight that all are so worthy of our love and kindness.  We know there just aren’t enough years to praise Her name, to love Her tender face in the faces of our brothers and sisters.  There is no bad guy!  There is only the embodiment of Her, on the cross of heaven and earth, angel and creature, struggling to live up to Her heavenly gift under the weight of this unconscious conflict and self-hate.  There is nothing so compelling as that and to offer whatever we have to that.

This is something that rises when you get broken.  There’s this wealth of gratitude, this feeling that the debt can never be repaid for the beauty of Her in every being.  I couldn’t possibly give any of you enough to serve the liberation of the love that is hidden in your heart.  Ammachi says I want to die comforting someone – she’s hugging herself to death and it’s her joy, because everything in her says I am here to be given to You who I am as well.  That is the feeling when we’re emptied out. It’s what we are underneath the conflict.

And it keeps getting deeper.  We keep getting more sensitive, more transparent.  Pretty soon we might as well sit inside everybody’s pants, it’s so intimate.  You have a feeling across the room and I feel you.  And it’s my joy to have you guys fill my body with your angst.  I’m dying to help you with that.  I’ll meet anything you have.  You have a cold?  Give it to me.  I can’t even imagine the joy Christ must have felt to die for his God in the form of his brothers and sisters.  What else can I give?  All I’ve got is my life, sure.  What a joy it is to love you, to be this love, to know you as love, to break the bread of love with each other, to give you, my most precious, whatever it is I have to give, which is never enough to glorify your beauty and Her name, and to liberate the dove of gorgeous tender love that lives in your heart.

And guess what?  All the while She is loving Herself through you.  THROUGH you.  So you get loved as it moves through your body.  Your entire body is radiated by God’s love as you apparently love.  There’s only Her radiant love.

So, yes, that’s the only thing worth longing for.  If you have the longing for this love, yeah!  Stoke that fire, burn in that place where you want it so bad.  Don’t calm that down!  It’s worth it.

~ Jeannie Zandi

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the unbroken

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There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.

~ Rashani Réa

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goneness, grief and grace

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to truly grieve
is to, somehow
(by Grace?)
find the guts
to welcome
goneness

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Grief and sadness are often mistakenly thought to be the same. They aren’t. Sadness will have its time and place – usually in the immediate aftermath of a loss. But sadness isn’t good company for those whose work is to grieve.

Sadness, as Byron Katie so succinctly put it, is “a hissy fit”. Sadness looks backwards and wants the what-is to still be the what-was.

Grief meets the what-is with no agenda other than to be 100% present, nakedly nowful.

The astonishing gift of grief and grieving is that it opens us to a love beyond anything we have ever known.

Rashani Réa, in her quietly, powerfully, honest book Beyond Brokenness says she has never met anyone who isn’t unconsciously holding grief.

I decided to take a look, and yes. There it was, patiently awaiting the impartial light of awareing. A little list of gonenesses, each one a treasure, an irreplaceable chapter in the story of a Life.

As this unlit light beams them into presence they come into full bloom, they mature and scatter their seeds of wisdom. Then – they vanish.

The only residue is the wetness on my cheeks.

And this love!

This sweet, helpless, holy love; it is love to die for.

Might you have a goneness list in hiding?

Go for it beloved.

~ miriam louisa

Whoever finds love
beneath hurt and grief,
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new guises
~ Rumi

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