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Posts from the ‘Emergence’ Category

Jan 20

Moments Blooming, Full Color

“Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise.”― Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen

“Wherever life can grow, it will.
It will sprout out,
and do the best it can.
I give you what I have.
You don’t get all your questions answered in this world.
How many answers shall be found
in the developing world of my Poem?
I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem,
which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Winnie

Life blooming.
In the moment.
Woven in plain sight of this day.
Notice and participate.

“She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves. ”― Gwendolyn Brooks

Jan 18

At Any Time, All the Time, Light

“I don’t believe there is one great thing I was made to do in this world. I believe there is one great God I was made to glorify. And there will be many ways, even a million little ways, I will declare his glory with my life.”― Emily P. Freeman, A Million Little Ways: Uncover the Art You Were Made to Live

“At any time you can ask yourself:
At which threshold am I now standing?
At this time in my life, what am I leaving?
Where am I about to enter?
What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold?
What gift would enable me to do it?
A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres.
Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.
At this threshold a great complexity of emotion comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds: to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward.
The time has come to cross.” – John O’Donohue

Varieties of presence
Close up
Far away
Big
Small
Busy, over busy, distractions
Mostly in-between, a mix and muddle
Where sweetness lies, right next to grief, beside gratitude
Cloaked in grace, awe, wonder
For the taking and receiving
If we choose
Someday is now
Ordinary days
Steps leading to thresholds
Rarely aware walking it out
Slowly then suddenly
Breathe, witness, partake
Wherever you are on this leg of the journey
Slow, pause, stop
Look up and around
Beauty, light, hope, love
On the ground you stand
This very day.

“Poetry is life distilled.”― Gwendolyn Brooks

Jan 5

To Be Wild

“I no longer want more. I want to be wild.” – Emma Tynan

“May you find the singular pathway within—the one that leads you back to the places that never asked you to strive.

And when the world asks you to chase, when it tells you that “more” is the answer, may you remember there is another way. A way to root deeply. A way to belong to yourself. A way to listen for the answers buried in the clay of your own heart.

May you come to know yourself in all the wild places, and may they guide you home.” – Emma Tynan

Slow entry
Soft step
Senses atune
Rooted and reaching
Anchored and in flight
Deeper, mattering, emergence
Clay of your own heart
Whisper of soul
Listen, explore the wilderness within
Welcome home.

“This wildness is not “more.” It’s not another ladder, another stretch, another version of self-betterment. It’s remembered. It’s a movement toward what remembers you: ancestry, instinct, soul, native language, the wisdom carried quietly in your bones.

Wildness doesn’t ask for performance or destruction. It invites you deeper, beneath the polished edges and the well-rehearsed roles, into the place where your truest nature lives. It asks you to let yourself be held by the places your soul recognizes. It is the feeling of being met by a landscape and knowing, in some wordless way, that you are not separate from it.” – Emma Tynan

Nov 10

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Truest Lines

“In the hush beyond hurry, beauty begins”― AshRawArt

“Peace is not found by silencing the noise, but by remembering you don’t have to answer every echo.”― Ajmal, The Border of a Mind

Enter slow
Ease the pace
Space, stillness, clarity

“In stillness, the soul sketches it’s truest lines.”― AshRawArt

Oct 8

All the Things, and More

“Long have you timidly waded
Holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea,
Rise again, nod to me, shout,
And laughingly dash with your hair.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“Half of me is filled with bursting words and half of me is painfully shy. I crave solitude yet also crave people. I want to pour life and love into everything yet also nurture my self-care and go gently. I want to live within the rush of primal, intuitive decision, yet also wish to sit and contemplate. This is the messiness of life – that we all carry multitudes, so must sit with the shifts. We are complicated creatures, and ultimately, the balance comes from this understanding. Be water. Flowing, flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough.”― Victoria Erickson

With grace, compassion, kindness
To be where you are at
Nowhere else
Present, awake, like water
Ebb, flow, still
Multitudes, complexities, messiness
Watching and wondering
Anchoring and rooting
Hope and resilience
Gratitude and grief
Static, in motion, changing, staying the same
All of the things
And so much more
The dance of becoming, unfolding, unknowing, being, emergence.

“Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Aug 11

Butterfly Attention

“The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.”― William Edgar Stafford

“I embrace emerging experience.
I participate in discovery.
I am a butterfly.
I am not a butterfly collector.
I want the experience of the butterfly.”
― William Stafford

A butterfly dropped before me, arms length
Waking me out of a walking trance
Dancing, following, abiding
Then resting on the tip of a branch
Overseeing, witnessing, participating
To be the butterfly
Drop in ocean
Ocean in drop
Glance and gaze
Big beautiful guiding world all around
To understand and be understood.

“All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.”― Kabir

Mar 21

Steadfast and Still

“…smile first, then speak.”― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Be still, my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
though time is draining from the clock
and your walk, that was confident and quick,
has become slow.

So, be slow if you must, but let
the heart still play its true part.
Love still as once you loved, deeply
and without patience. Let God and the world
know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.” – Mary Oliver

Become slow.
Stop.
What we take up
What we put down
Choose
Inflection point
A-ha moment
The pivot
Emergence in the pause
The gift has been given
Accept and embrace

“Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.” – Mark Nepo

Mar 14

Kaleidoscope Twist

“Life is a kaleidoscope of colors; a myriad hues and shades that form patterns and pictures in constant motion.” – Ellen Hopkins

“The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colours, which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.” – James Allen

Take a field trip from …
Black, white, grey to bold color, hues, shades
Striving to restoration, sit down!
Speed to slow, a pause to reset
Complaining to gratitude, even a sliver
My way or the way, walk it out one step at a time
Judgement to empathy, a smile will do
Worst case scenario to best, better even
Doing to being, check nothing off the list for a bit
Serious to laughter, joy does wonders
Scarcity to abundance, knee deep in a river dying from thirst
Adjust your view, twist the kaleidoscope
Shift the narrative, write the next chapter
Wander off the old beaten path, get muddy
Open the windows, fresh air
Skip out the door, don’t trip
New possibilities brimming, overflowing, bursting
Blank canvas, use all of the colors
Paint your day anew, even an hour will do

“At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.” – Jean Houston

Feb 3

Ever-Ness

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.”― George Eliot

“Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor.
With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats.
I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them.
Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness.
Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity.
May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.
May I stay forever in the stream.
May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.”– Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

Upstream where the river is but a trickle
Fertile soil readied for planting
Beauty ever present
What will I plant, nurture, feed today?
Paying rapt attention to what is mine to hold
Tiny but useful
In the flow of life everchanging
Longing, wishing, waiting, abiding, tending, pursuing
Planting trees we’ll never see
Sense of ever-ness overflowing

“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion–a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.”― George Eliot, Middlemarch

Oct 25

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Life Woven in Today

“The world is alive, blinking and clicking, winking at us slyly, inviting us to get up and dance to the music that’s been playing since the beginning of time, if you bend all the way down and put your ear to the ground and listen for it.”― Shauna Niequist

“Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you’ve been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you’re having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull of the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted.

Your life, right now, today, is exploding with energy and power and detail and dimension, better than the best movie you have ever seen. You and your family and your friends and your house and your dinner table and your garage have all the makings of a life of epic proportions, a story for the ages. Because they all are. Every life is.

You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural.

You are more than dust and bones.
You are spirit and power and image of God.
And you have been given Today.”― Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

Delight in this day.
Steep in beauty.
Let joy in.
She’s on your doorstep.
Present and awake.
Unfolding and unfurling.
Ordinary moments, extraordinary grace, deep awe, sweet wonder.
Life woven in today.
Show up.

“Present is living with your feet firmly grounded in reality, pale and uncertain as it may seem. Present is choosing to believe that your own life is worth investing deeply in, instead of waiting for some rare miracle or fairytale. Present means we understand that the here and now is sacred, sacramental, threaded through with divinity even in its plainness. Especially in its plainness.”― Shauna Niequist, Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living

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