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Posts tagged ‘Contemplation’

Jan 15

lOOk and listen

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”― Mary Oliver

“Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.” – Marcus Aurelius

A painted rock on a snowbank on a morning walk
A prompt
A clue
A calling
To notice
To awaken
To observe
Listen
Look
Slow enough to see the detail in the moment
The gravity of now
Time held still to reveal and rejoice in what already is overflowing
Even God rested on Sunday
And it was and is good.

“By letting go it all gets done.”― Lao-Tzu

Jan 10

Continual Arriving

“Silence is a source of Great Strength.”― Lao Tzu

“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”― Lao Tzu

When the water pools, find the passage to the river.
Flowing and free.
Static to dynamic.
Separate to connection, belonging.
Real time awareness.
Reflection for witnessing.
Intuition and experience.
Beginner and wanderer.
Mystery and meaning.
Hold patterns and landings.
Beginnings and endings. Repeat.
Before, after and the in between where we reside the most.
Create the space and grace for the mix of it all.
The cycle of continual arriving.

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”― Lao Tzu

Jan 9

Greatest Treasures

“Stop leaving and you will arrive. Stop searching and you will see. Stop running away and you will be found.”― Lao Tzu

“Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

January.
The month of strong starts and quick stops.
Returning to familiar old when motivation wanes and drains.
Change it this time.
Not leaps and grand gestures.
A few steps each day repeated to compound, multiply, root.
Repeat, focus, keep going.
Mindfulness. Reflection. Action.
Do the daily work and wait.
Letting go to take hold.
Clearing clutter within and out to create space.
Renewal a moment, an hour, a day at time.
Body, mind, soul.
Simplicity, patience, compassion.
Caterpillar to butterfly.

“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Jan 3

Endless Ways

“Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.”
― Khalil Gibran

“Your daily life is your temple and your religion.”― Kahill Gibran

Rush not into the new year with grand gestures but small repeated daily acts, shifts, rituals
Quiet time to reflect
Focused time to move
Sacred time to prompt gratitude, wonder and awe
Trying new things
Make new mistakes
Become a beginner again and again
Listen to different perspectives
Seek beauty hidden in the details of ordinary days
Swallow and drink in the mystery of you and the world
Endless ways to see the same thing and be made new.

“I learned that mystery doesn’t mean that something is unknowable; it merely points to the fact that there are endless ways of seeing that same thing. My job is to let go of enough order and control so I can experience life’s mysteries in full.”— J. Patrick Boland and Richard Rohr, Every Thing Is Sacred: 40 Practices and Reflections on the Universal Christ

Dec 30

Make Me Think

“The Abrahamic religions refer to God as Spirit, the holy wind animating life.”― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.”― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

I love things that make me think, really think.
Move me to another level, to discovery, an unfolding.
That challenge, make me look twice and again, longer, beneath the surface, above the obvious.
To beauty, to patterns, to connection, to wonder, imagination and awe.
A space of unknowing, unlearning, undoing of assumptions, opinions and judgment.
Relational rather than transactional.
A book, a song, a poem, a flower, a sunset, a child, an adult who remembers what it’s like to be a child.
Expanding rather than contracting.
An invitation, allowing and opening.
From me and other to us.
A response and action to change and be changed.
To see and be seen.
Make me think and think again.
Through my mind but mostly through my heart.

“Dream up the kind of world you want to live in. Dream out loud.”― Bono

Dec 20

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Winter Solstice Eve

“Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.” – Wayne Dyer

“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” – T. S. Eliot

The tipping point of the tipping point
The cusp, the height, the depth
Longest night, shortest day
The first day of winter, though the preview feels like the full movie
Solstice comes from the Latin words “sol” – sun and “sistere” – to stand still
The sun stands still
An invitation to do the same
To witness, to watch, to wait
The beginning of the journey to light
The slow march to spring,
The rebirth of the sun
May you solstice well
Dance in darkness and light
Allowing the stillness to reveal, renew, transform.

“In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.” – Eckhart Tolle

Dec 19

Passages

“The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it”― Henri Nouwen

“Awe is the gateway to compassion. It is a deep awareness that we are creators, creators who work with the Creator, in an ongoing project of crafting a world. If we do not like the world or are afraid of it, we have had a hand in that. And if we made a mess, we can clean it up and do better. We are what we make.”― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

Unfolding
Unfurling
Unraveling
Renewing
Rejuvenation
Reverberation
Beginnings
Birth
Bloom
May you passthrough the gateway of awe to wonder, joy and peace.

“What we need is here.” — Wendell Berry

Dec 3

Attention to Awe

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

Beyond a mere passing glance, a blur
Pause, sit, watch
Pay attention, rapt attention
Linger
If but only for a minute or two to get caught by beauty
Held hostage by awe and wonder
A mark of eternity
Spark to flame.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”― Simone Weil

Nov 27

Uninvited, Make Room

“This is the homely heart of Incarnation, this meeting of God in man with men and women, this simple face of divine graciousness in ordinary life rather than in the hymns of church fathers or in the dry elaborations of theologians.”― Eugene Kennedy, Joy of Being Human

“Aliveness, he will teach, is a gift available to all by God’s grace. It flows not from taking, but giving, not from fear but from faith, not from conflict but from reconciliation, not from domination but from service. It isn’t found in the upper trappings of religion -rules and rituals, controversies and scruples, temples and traditions. No, it springs up from our innermost being like a fountain of living water. It intoxicates us lie the best wine ever and so turns life from disappointment into a banquet.”― Brian D. McLaren

No lectures.
No rules and regulations.
No judgment.
An invitation into the waiting, wandering and grace.
Open to all, owned by none.
Greater than our imagination, more substance than opinion.
May the story of Advent welcome you home to love, peace and light.
Make room.

“Into this world, this demented inn
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited.”― Thomas Merton

Nov 20

A Broad Place

“Out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me in a broad place.” – Psalm 118

“As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here.”― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

May we all have the capacity and desire to change and be changed.
Becoming new again and again.
To see the same from other sides, new angles.
To understand more than be understood.
To stand in the complexities, the yes and no, knowing and unknowing, belief and doubt, organized and unorganized, reason and wonder.
Allowing it all and opening up.
In broad places and thin spaces.

“Standing eye to eye with being as being, we realize that we are able to look at the world with two faculties—with reason and with wonder. Through the first we try to explain or to adapt the world to our concepts, through the second we seek to adapt our minds to the world.”— Mark Nepo, Surviving Storms: Finding the Strength to Meet Adversity

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