Tag Archives: inspiration

memo to earth species H. sapiens

Posted on by

6

Let us find our place:   on our knees in awe, wonderment and humility.

 

Earth, Jupiter and Venus seen from Mars

 
Consider that:

– You can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum.

– As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy.

– 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.”

– The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star.

– Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.

– The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist.

So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it.

This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.
 

 
Source: NASA Lunar Science Institute

Image: Earth, Jupiter and Venus, seen from Mars

Thanks to: love is a place
 

 
I posted this to Facebook a year ago.  It’s been circulating again recently and since many readers of this blog don’t ‘do’ Fb I decided to share it here as well.   It’s a keeper.
 
PS:
Where, in this whirling mix of cosmic biomaterial and activity can a solid, changeless self be found?  If such an entity can’t be found, what KNOWS this?
 

now is the time

Posted on by

9

Sometimes a poem demands a visual counterpart; sometimes an image demands a poem; occasionally the symbiosis is stunning.  

This much-loved poem from Hafiz paired with Scott Morgan‘s sublime photograph delivers me to a View that is boundless.  

I dance there, breathe there, and I am grateful for this Grace.

 

Photograph by Scott Morgan

 

Now is the time to know

That all that you do is sacred.

 

Now, why not consider

A lasting truce with yourself and God.

 

Now is the time to understand

That all your ideas of right and wrong

Were just a child’s training wheels

To be laid aside

When you finally live

With veracity

And love.

 

Hafiz is a divine envoy

Whom the Beloved

Has written a holy message upon.

 

My dear, please tell me,

Why do you still

Throw sticks at your heart

And God?

 

What is it in that sweet voice inside

That incites you to fear?

 

Now is the time for the world to know

That every thought and action is sacred.

 

This is the time for you to compute the impossibility

That there is anything

But grace.

 

Now is the season to know

That everything you do

Is sacred.

 

– Hafiz

 

Today, by Hafiz. From the The Gift: Poems of Hafiz as rendered by Daniel Ladinsky.

Image: Scott Morgan – www.thissimplegrace.com

 

love and joy, thanks and celebration

Posted on by

5

Sitting in my rainforest sanctuary on Christmas Day, alone and at peace, listening to the forest sing its hymns of praise, wondering when the mercury will stop climbing and the mozzies munching – noticing a little urge to send my thoughts of love and joy, thanks and celebration, to all the beloveds who join me on this wee patch of cyberspace.  I’ve shared my delight of the art and writing of Michael Leunig in other posts; this is his beautiful Christmas prayer.

…

Christmas.

Dear God, it is timely that we give thanks for the lives of all prophets,
teachers, healers and revolutionaries, living and dead, acclaimed or obscure,
who have rebelled, worked and suffered for the cause of love and joy.

We also celebrate that part of us, that part within ourselves,
which has rebelled, worked and suffered for the cause of love and joy.

We give thanks and celebrate.

Amen

…

Michael Leunig - Bush Christmas

Huge clouds of brown butterflies swirl up into the dazzling light, parrots swoop to grassy earth, honeyeaters ravish the sweet flowers of the bottlebrush, echidnas trundle steadily in search of each other, lizards dart among ants and ancient rocks, the fine branchlets of the manna gums quiver to the mating growls of koalas, ibises stroll and feast on grasshoppers and gleaming Christmas beetles hang from eucalyptus leaves like small green baubles. The birds sing gloriously and not a wrong note is heard. This is Christmas in the [Australian] bush.

For joy and meaning [let us] turn to our natural country and witness miracles of vitality and new life, of inspiration and profound beauty; all in some humble, quiet and improbable place.

…

I’m happy to confess that I am holed up in a “humble, quiet and improbable place.”  But whatever and wherever your place may be, I pray that your holy-days are a source of the miraculous, the vital, the beautiful and the sacred.

Quoted text from www.theage.com.au
Artwork by Michael Leunig

nothing ever dies but a dream

Posted on by

9

I’m celebrating an anniversary this morning. Three years ago the dream had a daughter holding her beloved mother as she breathed the breath that would never return.

I’m also celebrating because, for the first time in those three years, the pain has vanished. The passage of time is a great healer, as is the time spent silently aware-ing on the zafu.  But I also honor the beloved mentors who have appeared in the story, their healing tools in hand. They are many, but I particularly want to thank: A kind, wise Lama, who sent me away on a retreat to find “the mother” I mourned. And a dear, dear woman whose energy healing (EFT) triggered the release of volumes of stories held in this body’s cellular vaults. And – Byron Katie. The work of the Work leaves no lie uncovered, and o-m-g some monster furphies were happily beavering away in this wee dream called ‘me’. One of them, running below the limn of  consciousness in spite of intellectual clarity about and acceptance of impermanence and the impossibility of independent self-hood, was a subtle and sneaky belief in death.

Nothing was ever born but a dream.
Nothing ever dies but a dream.

Reality is the always-stable, never-disappointing base of experience.
When I look at what really is, I can’t find a me.
As I have no identity, there’s no one to resist death.
Death is everything that has been dreamed,
including the dream of myself,
so at every moment I die of what has been
and am continually born as awareness in the moment,
and I die of that, and am born in it again.
The thought of death excites me.
Everyone loves a good novel and looks forward to how it will end.
It’s not personal.
After the death of the body, what identification will the mind take on?
The dream is over, I was perfection,
I could not have had a better life.
And whatever I am is born in this moment
as everything good that has ever lived.
~ Byron Katie

One dream ends. And here’s the beauty of it – this unlit light | reality | primordial awareness – abides, even as new dreams appear.

And I can hear her l a u g h t e r . . .

Gladness! Gratitude! Grace!

.

silence has found me

Posted on by

5

silence has found me

its ruthless simplicity
has culled the clutter
from closets
I never knew existed
in the corridors of my brain

its unstoppable tide
has drowned the demon
that danced through my days,
demanding:
control, adjust, fix!

its throbbing roar
has muted the mutterings
of protest,
the pleas for reprieve,
from the screaming ‘me-me!’ myth

its yawning vastness
has swallowed whole
the impostor who once laid claim
to this luminous lifestream:
t i m e

its perfect love
has melted all that I took
to be me
in its crucible of fiery
Grace

and the receptors in these cells
heard the words
the whole world hungers
to hear:

you are loved!

how could it be otherwise
when separation from your essence
is impossible?

be silence
and Know