heartsteps

Wayfarer

Your whole mind and body have been tied
To the foot of the Divine Elephant
With a thousand golden chains.

Now, begin to rain intelligence and compassion
Upon all your tender, wounded cells

And realize the profound absurdity
Of thinking

That you can ever go Anywhere
Or do Anything

Without God’s will.

Hafiz

And the priestess spoke again and said: ‘Speak to us of Reason and Passion.’

And he answered saying:

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against passion and your appetite.

Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.

But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.

If either your sails or our rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.

For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion; that it may sing;

And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house.

Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows – then let your heart say in silence, ‘God rests in reason.’

And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, – then let your heart say in awe, ‘God moves in passion.’

And since you are a breath In God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

Kahlil Gibran

Every creature has a religion. Every
foot is a shrine where
a secret candle
burns.

Every cell in us worships
God.

Every arrow in the bow of desire
has rushed out in hope
of nearing
Him.

Thomas Aquinas

The First Training: Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I vow to cultivate compassion and learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking and in my way of life.

The Second Training: Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing and oppression, I vow to cultivate loving kindness and learn ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants and minerals. I vow to practice generosity by sharing my time, energy, and material resources with those in real need. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property of others, but I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on earth.

The Third Training: Aware of the suffering caused by sexual misconduct, I vow to cultivate responsibility and learn ways to protect the safety and integrity of individuals, couples, families and society. I am determined not to engage in sexual relations without love and a long-term commitment. To preserve the happiness of myself and others, I am determined to respect my commitments and the commitments of others. I will do everything in my power to protect children from sexual abuse and to prevent couples and families from being broken by sexual misconduct.

The Fourth Training: Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and the inability to listen to others, I vow to cultivate loving speech and deep listening in order to bring joy and happiness to others and relieve others of suffering. Knowing that words can create happiness or suffering, I vow to learn to speak truthfully, with words that inspire self-confidence, joy and hope. I am determined not to spread news that I do not know to be certain and not to criticize or condemn things of which I am not sure. I will refrain from uttering words that can cause division or discord; or words that can cause the family or the community to break. I will make all efforts to reconcile and resolve all conflicts, however small.

The Fifth Training: Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I vow to cultivate good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practicing mindful eating, drinking and consuming. I vow to ingest only items that preserve peace, well being, and joy in my body, in my consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family and society. I am determined not to use alcohol or any other intoxicant or to ingest foods or other items that contain toxins, such as certain TV programs, magazines, books, films and conversations. I am aware that to damage my body and my consciousness with these poisons is to betray my ancestors, my parents, my society and future generations. I will work to transform violence, fear, anger and confusion in myself and in society by practicing a diet for myself and for society. I understand that a proper diet is crucial for self transformation and the transformation of society.

Thich Nhat Hanh

O Children of Nothing!
Truth can’t come in through your eyes,
Nor can speech go out through your mouth to find Him;
Hearing leads the speaker down the road to anxiety,
And if you follow your hands and feet you will arrive at confusion -
The real work is in the Heart:
Wake up your Heart! Because when the Heart is completely awake,
Then it needs no Friend.

Rabi’a

We stood before the waving sea
and stared at vast infinity,
and praised the Life that brought us here
to take our ride upon this sphere,
for when we reach the distant shore
I know we’ll be returning,
rich from the journey
rich from the journey.

You never know what’s up ahead.
The tempest rolls and the skies are red.
But, off into the world that waits
between tomorrow and today,
to seek our fortunes and our fates,
driven by this yearning,
to be rich from the journey,
rich from the journey.

and when it’s time to leave the harbour of this dream
we’ll have a heart that’s filled with memories.

So sail away sweet soul in peace.
Hoist your sails into the breeze.
Beneath these stars so hard to read,
Godspeed the winds that carry me
and tell my friends to look for me
for soon I’ll be returning,
rich from the journey.

Kimmie Rhodes

Rich from the journey mp3

Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted & pieced – fold, fallow & plough;
And all trades, their gear & tackle & trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled, (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Great Buddha of Kamakura is a bronze statue of Amida Buddha.

The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character.
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.

The Buddha

Offer only lovely things on my altars -
the bread of life, and jewels, and feathers and flowers.
Let the streams of life flow in peace.
Turn from violence.
Learn to think for a long time how to change this world,
and how to make it better to live in.
All the people in the world ought to talk about it
and speak well of it always.
The it will last forever, and the flowers will bloom forever,
and I will come to you again.

Quetzalcoatl

"heart and soul"

The human heart craves certainty yet life is sometimes uncertain. In times of ambiguity, doubt and apprehension, I claim the certain safety of my spiritual connection. Reminding myself that even in the face of difficult change, my grounding in Spirit remains secure, I find ground on which to stand. It is timeless and serene. Spirit is the bedrock beneath all experience. When I am threatened and adrift, I remind myself Spirit is an inner fortress, constant and secure.

Today I embrace Spirit as the rock of my existence. Spirit gives my soul an earthly home.

Judith Cameron

"Christ of St. John of the Cross" Salvador Dali

She caught me off guard when my soul said to me,
“Have we met?”

So surprised I was to hear her speak like that
I chuckled.

She began to sing a tale: “There was once a hard working man
who used to worry so much because he could
not feed and clothe his children and
wife the way he wanted.

There was a beautiful little chapel in the village
where the man lived and one day while
he was praying, an angel
appeared.

The angel said, “Follow me.” And he did into an ancient forest.
“Now dig here,” the angel said. And the man felt strength in
his limbs he had not known since youth and with just
his bare hands, he dug deep and found
a lost treasure, and his relationship
with the world changed.”

Finding our soul’s beauty does that – gives us
tremendous freedom
from worry.

John of the Cross

You might hear the beautiful shout of “Geronimo”
from a lover who has just dove from a
cliff and is heading full speed
into the Ocean – into the
Beloved.

And of course there will always be lots of gab
along the shore from those who are
drawn to God

but have yet to really get bare assed
and go in.

“Geronimo” may be the last word we hear
from that brave gal falling 625 mph
from a cliff,

for once beneath the sea,
once within the Water,

only fish open their mouths, still bargaining
for something.

The soul becomes quiet in ecstasy, so quiet.
Love speaks in the absence of God,
not in the heights
of passion.

Tukaram

How is it they live for eons in such harmony -
the billions of stars -

when most men can barely go a minute
without declaring war in their mind against someone they know.

There are wars where no one marches with a flag,
though that does not keep casualties
from mounting.

Our hearts irrigate this earth.
We are fields before
each other.

How can we live in harmony?
First we need to
know

we are all madly in love
with the same
God.

Thomas Aquinas

Ikhnation, 14th Century BC

Creator of the germ in woman,
Maker of seed in man,
Giving life to the son in the body of his mother,
Soothing him that he may not weep,
Nurse (even) in the womb,
Giver of breath to animate every one that he maketh!
When he cometh forth from the womb…
on the day of his birth,
Thou openest mouth in speech.
Thou suppliest his necessities.
When the fledgling in the egg chirps in the shell
Thou givest him breath therein to preserve him alive…
He goeth about upon his two feet
When he hath come forth therefrom.
How manifold are thy works!
They are hidden from before us
O sole God, whose powers no other possesseth.
Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart.

Ikhnation, Pharoah of Egypt

 

Rabia al-Adawiyya, 8th Century Islamic Saint

The sky gave me its heart
because it knew mine was not large enough to care
for the earth the way it did.

Why is it that we think of God so much?
Why is there so much talk
about love?

When an animal is wounded
no one has to tell it,
“You need to heal”;
so naturally it will nurse
itself the best it can.

My eye kept telling me, “Something is missing from
all I see.” So it went in search for the cure.

The cure for me was His beauty, the remedy -
for me was to
love.

Rabia al-Adawiyya

"Sorrow" by John D. Bailey

When sorrow comes, let us accept it simply, as a part of life. Let the heart be open to pain; let it be stretched by it. All the evidence we have says that this is the better way. An open heart never grows bitter. Or if it does, it cannot remain so. In the desolate hour, there is an outcry; a clenching of the hands upon emptiness; a burning pain of bereavement; a weary ache of loss. But anguish, like ecstasy, is not forever. There comes a gentleness, a returning quietness, a restoring stillness. This, too, is a door to life. Here, also is the deepening of meaning – and it can lead to dedication; a going forward to the triumph of the soul, the conquering of the wilderness. And in the process will come a deepening inward knowledge that in the final reckoning, all is well.

A. Powell Davies

My gift for unconditional love is a great blessing in my life. I am able to manifest an inner nobility in my relationships. I accept those who love me as they are. I allow them to love me at their speed and tempo as they are able. I do not dictate or control. their love for me is a gift. I allow them the right to choose how and why they give it. Those who love me are part of God’s love for me. They are part of the larger plan of my life. I allow God to remain the whole. I root myself in God, accepting the relationships which come to me as a part of something larger that holds all of us within its scope. I find the steadfastness of divine companionship. I allow God to be my primary security, the deep soil of my heart’s safety. Rooted in God, I allow human love to gift me and grace me but I do not demand a god-like security from human love. I find perfect love, perfect security, perfect safety in God. I allow my human loves to be human and I love them in their humanity.

Julia Cameron

I wanted to be a hermit and only hear the hymns
of the earth, and the laughter of the sky,

and the sweet gossip of the creatures on my limbs,
the forests.

I wanted to be a hermit and not see another face
look upon mine and tell me I was not
all the beauty in this
world.

For so many faces do that -
cage us.

The wings we have are so fragile
they can break from just
one word, or

a glance void
of love.

I wanted to live in that cloister of
light’s silence

because, it is not true, the heart
is so fragile and shy.

Catherine of Siena

God
and I have become
like two giant fat people living
in a tiny
boat.

We
keep bumping into
each other
and
l
a
u
g
h
i
n
g
.

Hafiz

Not
Christian or Jew or
Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen.
Not any religion

Or cultural system. I am
not from the east
or the west. Not
out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not
natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all.
I do not exist,

am not an entity in this
world or next,
did not descend from
Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is
the placeless, a trace
of the traceless,
neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved,
have seen the two worlds as one and
that one
call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner
only that breath breathing
Human being.

Rumi

We should make all spiritual talk
Simple today:

God is trying to sell you something,
But you don’t want to buy.

That is what your suffering is:

Your fantastic haggling,
Your manic screaming over the price!

Hafiz

God loves a curved universe.

Buckminster Fuller

God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

12th Century Latin hermetic text

Commerce is supported by keeping the individual at odds with himself and others, by making us want more than we need, and offering credit to buy what refined senses do not want.

The masses become shackled; I see how their eyes weep and are desperate – of course they feel desperate – for something some remedy that a poor soul then feels needs to be bought.

I find nothing more offensive than a god who could condemn human instincts in us that time in all its wonder have made perfect.

I find nothing more destructive to the well-being of life than to support a god that makes you feel unworthy and in debt to it.

I imagine erecting churches to such a strange god will assure endless wars that commerce loves.

A god that could frighten is not a god – but an insidious idol and weapon in the hands of the insane.

A god who talks of sin is worshipped by the infirm.

I was spiritually ill once – we all pass through that – but one day the intelligence in my soul cured me.

Meister Eckhart – written 700 years ago

With a wish to free all beings
I shall always go for refuge
To the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha,
Until I reach full enlightenment.

Enthused by wisdom and compassion
Today in the Buddha’s presence
I generate the Mind for Full Awakening
For the benefit of all sentient beings.

As long as space remains,
As long as sentient beings remain,
Until then, may I too remain,
And dispel the miseries of the world.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

Huang-po, ninth Century Zen master

Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really void, but the realm of real Dharma.

Huang Po

Grace — such a lovely word, so effortlessly evocative, being suggestive not only of a dimension of being ordinarily far from accessible to us, but also of a guidance and support preternaturally attuned to our deepest needs.

In Grace there is an implication or felt sense of sacred intervention, a not-by-us engineered doing that deeply serves our well-being, often in ways that are far from expected.

A serendipitous infusion of more-than-human guidance — this is Grace, however ragged or rough its delivery may be.

Grace — such a wonderfully rich word, conveying a heartfelt sense of something extraordinarily supportive arriving on our doorstep, palpably suffused with undeniable significance. It is a gift, regardless of its wrapping or reception.

In us there persists a longing for Grace, a longing to receive it and let it carry us where it may. And at the same time there may be a longing for Grace to arrive in a particular form, which of course does not necessarily happen. Sometimes what we most need is what we assume we least need, and Grace serves what we most need, which often means that it doesn’t seem to be Grace at all to us, but rather just a nasty turn of the wheel.

Grace is neither good luck nor the inevitable result of our good deeds; it is much more mysterious than that, responding as it does to more than just the obviously visible. It takes much more into account than we can see, being intimate with what is out of sight. Grace can be trusted. It won’t let us down, even if in the short term it deposits us in places or situations that we don’t like.

May Grace guide our days. May Grace flow through us. May Grace come to us. Such prayers are but confessions of intuiting or wanting to host the presence of something gloriously Other, something that is, sooner or later, recognized to be none other than what we truly are. May we not limit Grace to how we think it should manifest. May we not decide beforehand how Grace should look or behave. May our prayers for Grace reach without grabbing, ask without begging, and ready us without leaving us on hold. May we recognize Grace for what it is, and remain grateful for it.

Grace is the arrival and expression of not-by-us orchestrated direction and support, emerging without any strategy or manipulation on our part. When Grace shows up, we are guided in directions that we very likely would have otherwise overlooked or not seen. The gift of Grace is an astonishing thing, no matter how often we have witnessed it. It always feels fresh.

In the same sense that prayer is a divine personal, Grace is a divine intrusion. To the extent that prayer reaches up, Grace reaches down. The gravity of the situation demands it.

Some think of Grace as the tangible entry of our deepest dimensions into our everyday life, appearing in whatever form fits our prevailing belief system. But however we choose to conceptualize Grace, it exists. It doesn’t matter if we’re religious, agnostic, or atheistic. It doesn’t matter what our status is. It doesn’t matter how high we’ve been, or how low. When Grace shows up, we usually know it, whether we acknowledge it or not. We cannot engineer Grace, but we can deepen our receptivity to it, making room for it, knowing that we don’t know when it will show up, nor in what form it will arrive.

In the same sense that Life is the Poetry of Being, and Intimacy is the Poetry of Connection, and Beauty is the Poetry of Appearance, Grace is the Poetry of Evolution.

May Grace touch you, and touch you deeply.

Robert Masters

I need somebody
to touch me
in a healing way

Somebody

Somebody

to touch me -
with love

somebody
who can hold
this depth of pain

hold me
crying tears
for every woman
whose
being a woman
has ever
made her cry

Unshed grief
running out slowly
in a river
of cleansing salt

Akasa Hull