Tag Archives: light

I never knew

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Take off the backpack
Lie down in the long grass.
Pull up the blue sky-blanket.
Rest.

So many years of Dharma practice,
Straight-spine diligence, straining toward
enlightenment.
Today.
This hillside.
Just this.

Lie down in the long grass.
Let the earth take you.
Deer tracks and horse dung
and the eye within the eye,
revolving and luminous.

I never knew this.
Did no one ever tell me?

I remember my Zen master in the interview room,
‘Trust yourself,’ he said. ‘Just be yourself.’

I think his meaning was this:

Take off the backpack,
Lie down in the long grass.
Let the sky take you.
Rest.
Breathe space
into space
into space.

I never knew there was this much light!

~ Helen Dhara Gatling-Austin
October 31, 1998

You may already be familiar with this beautiful poem by Helen Dhara Gatling-Austin. I know it has been posted on many a blog and group over the last couple of decades, but to my mind, it’s one of those classics that never age or fail to inspire. It deserves frequent airings! For this post I sourced it from the Nonduality Highlights archive.

light will someday split you open

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Light
will someday split you open;
even if your life is now a cage …

Love
will surely burst you wide open
into an unfettered,
blooming new galaxy.

– Hafiz

 

– Tatiana Plakhova

complexitygraphics.com

 

thank you for the hairy ones

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This little blog was launched two years ago, on Mothers’ Day 2009, and dedicated to my sweet mother, Miriam. I’m a little late this year – it’s already Monday in this part of the world – but a post is pressing this morning, a prayer of gratitude for all mothers, including the miraculous and long-suffering Earth that is truly our lifelong womb.

Beloved Life

Thank you for Mothers

Thank you for all your awesome
ways
of replicating yourself
from simple cell-division
and eggs a zillion ways
to womb-birthed, pouch-held
babes

Thank you for the hairy
ones
the crusty, the creepy,
the slithery, the feathered ones,
the ones we love and
those that scare us silly

Thank you for the ones we call
human
our own, who built our scaffolding
from their own cells so that
the Light of your Awareness
would have a home

Thank you for their
generosity
regardless of our opinions,
our grievances, our stories, for
they made it possible for you
to create yourself
and to Know yourself

and to Know yourself
from birthing unto birthing as
Beloved

 

– miriam louisa

Photo: Slavka Gough, Bali, 2011

thank you, Beloved, for loving me

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Beloved Life

I thank you for this day called Christ-mass
that brings me a yearly reminder of
what it means to be innocently human,
to be the world without a center

to be born anew in humility and childlike wonder,
to be unafraid of things that go moo in the dark,
to trust utterly that Mother who is my source
my sustenance and Light

to rise from my habitude, however apparently binding
and follow the bright star of my heart’s longing
until the uncomplicated and obvious is revealed
in the unborn child within

to set my clever ideas atop a camel in the desert
and with beginner’s mind track that same star,
intent on finding an oasis of Truth that knowledge
and learning cannot reveal

to offer unwrapped gifts that hands have made –
little tokens too humble for a mega store
on the high street but that bring a sweet smile
to eyes that recognize sanctity

I thank you for all the prophets and sages
the awakened ones, the risen ones
the healers and teachers, alive and long gone
who have rebelled and suffered for the cause of Truth
leaving traces of their toil to guide my way

I give thanks for the sweetness
the relief, the body-blessing benediction
that resting in the cradle of Your Presence brings
and most of all I thank You, Beloved
for loving me in spite of
everything

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~ miriam louisa

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to surrender to the truth of yourself, is to surrender to love

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My title is stolen from Gangaji, with respectful thanks.

I’ve had an interesting few days since the last post. Interesting as in wondrous, as in OMG, and as in “what am I gonna do with this?”

(The last post. Crikey – isn’t that what they play at funerals?)

In this case it was a poem by Mary Oliver about Buddha’s last instruction imploring his friends and followers to “Make of yourself a light.”

Make of yourself a light. My beloved teacher Krishnamurti issued the same urgent invitation – “Be a Light unto yourself!” – and if anyone was a stand-up example of a being who put everything – even godhood – behind him to be his own Light, it was K.

Make of yourself a light. Be a Light unto yourself. I’ve been sitting with this and I confess it no longer makes sense to me. How can I be a Light unto ‘myself’ when what I am cannot be separated from the Light of Beingness? Clearly both K and the Buddha were speaking to the individual. But this Light that ‘I’ is, has no experienced beginning or end and is indivisible and changeless and inescapable. It’s meaningless to imagine that I am separate from it and need to make myself one with it. No disrespect to my teachers, but … why didn’t they come upfront and say something like “Be the changeless Light that you are?”

A Light. A Light that knows all other light as its shadow. This is the truth of what I am and I cannot argue with it. I can only dive deeper and deeper into it, to “surrender to it” as Gangaji writes.

And what a strange synchronicity: at the same time I have been becoming acutely, painfully aware that the bottom line for me now is Love. It’s the only thing that really, truly, interests me – Divine Love. Paradoxically, it seems to be most intimately known by its absence.

In the mix of moving and settling and re-establishing relationships I have been neglecting the Beloved. The zafu has been waiting, the Gap has been beckoning. To the extent that I have procrastinated I have felt the subtle ache of estrangement. Finally it could no longer be tolerated and I pinched my nose, held my breath and dropped into Point Zero – Zafuland.

Beloved Lover was there; lovingness and lightness and laughter were there.

No buts, no maybe’s. Love lies awaiting when ‘I’  make the turn – when Unlit Light makes the turn. There were tears. There was contrition. Lover simply laughs: “No big deal babe!”

Love is like good bread – it must be baked fresh every day.

Krishnamurti used to say “Enlightenment is a Light that is continually lighting itself.”

Yes. I go forth with a massive box of matches …

~ miriam louisa

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the Buddha’s last instruction

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“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire –
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

~ Mary Oliver, House of Light

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silence is the essence of us all

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It’s Vicki Woodyard day at unlitlight central today. I am so thrilled to know that Vicki’s new book Life With A Hole In It: that’s how the light gets in is out and available for purchase. But more of that later. First, a little treat about silence:

There is an essential silence that continually blesses us all.  I feel it as I type words into the void.  It unreels like an old movie, the kind where no voice was able to be heard.  It breathes life into the words of this world.  It animates everything.  Trees know it and rocks absorb and emit it.  Stars beam it down to us in the form of light.  How blessed we are to be that silence and to share it freely.  We do that because it is effortless.  A strained silence is noisy whereas essential silence is a benediction on this weary world.

The silence seeps in around the cracks of suffering. Like light, it is who we are. As love, it transforms ugliness into grace and grace into miracle.  I tend a piece of this silence.  I am farming it so that flowers grow tall and the soul’s lushness is revealed petal by petal, word by word.

Silence is the essence of us all.  The void from which we spring peppers the world with hallelujahs.  It softens the suffering soul and revives the desert landscape.  It also shows us the beauty of the desert and the dark valleys of loss.  Lest I become overwrought, I shall stop on a dime’s worth of words so you can feel like a millionaire within it all.
~ Vicki Woodyard

“… this time you found your voice and your passion to tell the truth yourself.  And that is how you go on.  Like the Energizer Bunny, you run on the battery of the beyond within.  It is a mystery and a blessing how everything works out when you determine to go the distance.”

If you would like to order a copy of Life With a Hole in It please go to

Booklocker.com

And bless you for believing in me.

~ Vicki Woodyard

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Free Excerpt From The Book (requires Adobe Reader)

source: the nonduality highlights

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