One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Breathe deep

You are here now

Resting here with me

I am all you ever need

I am the flowing river,

the stars and golden sun,

the still mountains and the swaying trees.

You who have lost your way

I am but a breath away

A simple breath away, always

You want to know the way?

The way in is a breath of faith

You’re not out here all alone

Breathe deep and say: I am not alone.

Life wants to take care of you

Life wants to caress you and

Sing you to sleep

It wants most of all for you to know

the depth of love available to you.

It is always there

And it’s there now

Beckoning softly

Come, come, come

Dance lightly, sweetly toward me

I am here for you to lean on evermore

I am not your child, your parents, your relatives, nor your friends

The hands of Divinity are everywhere constant, limit less.

You, who have suffered, throw off the dark garb and come running to me.

Spend a few minutes with an object, any object, and find God in it, here is where I am.

Let it envelop you and seduce you with it’s own unique God-ness

Now you know you have been seen and heard, come back to this place should you falter again.

©heartsdeesire

Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.  ~Richard Ben Sapi

Quite true, don’t you think?  This goes along with a question I have written on one of my homemade well being cards:

Will it matter in a year from now?

There are less than a handful of times I’ve come to that question and been able to answer – yes, it will matter.  Even then the truth is, circumstances will change and I will change.  I believe what Florence Scovel Shinn has written – only good lies before me.  Then, what’s the worry?!

So Beth, tell me, what IS the worry?  Hmmm, don’t have one anymore!

Thanks for listening to this quick little interaction in my head!  May all your troubles be small ones and if not, then may you know you are transformed by them.  Life will sometimes take us into the obscure, as yet to be defined or understood places.   Remember, though, the butterfly always emerges from the darkened chrysalis flying openly into the light.  When daybreak surfaces from the cloak of night, we are those butterflies.  And with a tiny flap of our wings, we send ripples of hope across the globe.

It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.
What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
The rivers will return to their beginnings.
The wind will cease in its turning about.
Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.
Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror—
They are children again.
The dead will wake up, not comprehending.
Till everything that happened has unhappened.
What a relief! Breathe freely, you who suffered much.

~Czeslaw Milosz~
New and Collected Poems 1931-2001

Towards the end of the video he speaks of technology in a way that I applaud.  So many want to slam technology for one reason or another.  Mooji says technology has made the world smaller in a beautiful way, we are becoming more unified and we begin to see that we are One.

Love his perspective, I have always felt that technology has offered a unique means of being in relationship with others.  It takes away from intimate connection or it enhances it, it’s all in how you see it.  I fall on the side of technology enhancing our relationships with each other and therefore humanity overall.

This is not a verbatim highlight transcription but reasonably close to his words:

Something deep in our psyche has always been searching for a joy, stillness, happiness, a contentment that won’t leave, won’t be destroyed, won’t fade.  The opportunity of the human existence is to discover what is eternal inside ourselves because up until now we are only discovering what is transient, what is passing.

There is no vulnerability in the true mind in the true heart.  When you come to the point that you feel that your life is going to burst open, be very present and don’t miss that opportunity.  You feel it as a curse; you don’t see it as a blessing because you identify with a false vulnerability of the self.  ”It” is offering a defining moment to split away from what is unreal to find the real. (LOVE!)  As long as you are comfortable with your sense of identity you will not go beyond it and if you don’t go beyond it you will never come into the truth.  There is a time for a human being to know these things and the time to know these things is when you have the power to go beyond these things. (ALSO LOVE!)

When you feel lost, when you feel confused, when you feel helpless, when you feel like you’ve run out of moves, when you feel like your life is on hold, right there, you yourself, become very, very quiet and empty of your own self because the chance is you will meet God in this moment. (LOVE AGAIN!)  You break all the boundaries, if you don’t hold the hand of your mind.

We are missing what is obvious, what is pure, what is beautiful.  But we don’t have to go so far to find this, because the truth is distance-less, it’s here.  It’s here; it’s only somehow concealed by distraction.  Our eyes move and plant themselves onto transient things.  But if the aspiration is inside a human being to grow, to find the truth, then he will find a way and the way will find him.

Happy New Year.  Happy Now Here.

I still stub my toe on the way to cake.  This was a story we heard from Abraham on one of their cruises.  During this cruise, it was Esther’s birthday.  She’d gone to bed for the night, when a knock came to her door.  Stumbling her way to the door in the dark, she stubbed her toe.  Ouch!  Upon opening the door, to her surprise, there was a birthday cake sent in her honor!

And so came the phrase – I still stub my toe on the way to cake.  It’s a way of saying we are always on our way to cake, we are always on the perfect path for us at the moment, and we just might stub our toe along the way.   It’s a softer, lighter means of making peace with the contrast that every one experiences at some time or another.

It was in my own dreams last night that the stub my toe phrase came back to me.  I had gone somewhere deep in the mountains for a retreat, many of us had gathered there.  The catch was your only way in and thus your only way out, was on foot.

The retreat is over and people try to hook up with others for the long trek back to our own homes.  It’s a circuitous route, easy to get lost and it’s fraught with snakes and wild life, best to not make the trip on foot alone.

This difficult route alone with snakes and wild life seems to be a metaphor for the contrast, the challenges we find ourselves amidst in life.

We are carrying all our belongings on our back.  I am traveling unusually lightly.  Ha, going into this year with less baggage perhaps!  High five for Bethie!  My companions are carrying much more and I think I should take some of their baggage, which is so like me to want to help and take on others stuff in the process.  Yet I shock myself, I don’t take their stuff on.  And as it happens, they begin to unwittingly drop their own baggage as they move further towards home.

Another beautiful metaphor, may we all drop our baggage as we travel home.  Home, as in who we really are, is by its very nature without all the baggage including the measuring stick of how well we’ve done in life, etc.

Next in the dream, we come to a point where we must walk a tight rope and below us is a sea of snakes.  We are crossing the tightrope when a literal paradise of flowers, in every shape and color begins blooming all around us.  The tightrope disappears and we are home again.

I realized then that garden was just like the birthday cake Esther received.  And I saw further that the point isn’t the contrast, it isn’t the challenges.   The point isn’t in stubbing the toe, or walking the tightrope. No, it’s remembering to enjoy the process no matter how challenging it is.  It’s remembering to see the beauty no matter how bad things look.  It’s a reminder that it’s always, always there.

It’s just that we get this tunnel vision that this or that sucks and we want out of it now, pronto, yesterday.  The way out starts with the little gifts, surprises that come knocking at our doorways in a plethora of ways, so plentiful you could not name or count them all in a day.

Consider spending a moment or more lingering inside the blessings bestowed upon you each and every day.

Posted this almost exactly a year ago and stumbled on it again just the other day.  I love my own sweet voice of wisdom here.  It reminded me that though I had moments where I thought I had lost everything I know deep down, it was never really lost to begin with.  It was right here all along.  I guess I do have those ruby slippers after all!

This is not always the jolliest season for everyone.  For those of you feeling some level of holiday blues, may you find some comfort here…

Sadness is present.  It was one of my former mentors who instructed us to state it just like that, in lieu of: I am sad. The ‘I am’ statement being one that married or joined you to sadness.

It’s just that ‘sadness is present’ has a sound akin to taking roll in class where Sadness sheepishly answers from the back row, “present”.  I wish that all my Sadnesses were in the back row, sheepish and barely audible.  Yet this one feels as if it’s in the front row and it’s cleared out the entire row for itself.

Actually, I am hoping that Sadness takes a bathroom break because Mischief has plans.  The plan is to stick a big thick wad of gum on Sadness’ seat.  That way when the bell rings, Sadness will be stuck there.  Ah, well now, Mischief has just been nudged by Wisdom and Kindness.  They say,  “All our emotions have a place here.”  “But why does Sadness have to take up an entire front row?” I argue.

“It wants to be noticed and embraced like Humor is.  It wants to see you welcome it the way you do when Joy bounces in the room.  It wants to see your face light up the way it does when Surprise and Delight saunter in.  It wants to be acknowledged just for who it is, not shunned.  It wants to be first-picked to play in the game, not last.  It takes up an entire row just to tell you, it has a right to be here.  And while you have a right to ignore Sadness, in doing so, you lose out on the full technicolor experience of living.”

Mischief never did put that wad of gum on Sadness’ seat.  Eventually Sadness sat in the center of the room, surrounded, embraced even, by all emotion.  There was one day in particular when the whole class voted on the Emotion of the Quarter.  Everyone picked Sadness.  Sadness, flanked by all its Friends, beamed with pride as it accepted the award.  It never sat alone in the back again nor cleared out an entire front row.  It was content to simply Be.

The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere
a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays
come down. A tomorrow has come. Open
your hands, lift them: morning rings
all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.
Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,
you could close your eyes and go on full of light.

And it is already begun, the chord
that will shiver glass, the song full of time
bending above us. Outside, a sign:
a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,
“Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant
has passed through town, widening streets, touching
the ground, shouldering away the stars.

~William Stafford~
William Tell: Poems by William Stafford

]]> http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2011/12/08/today-2/feed/ 0 Beth/Bethie sunrise-rays-over-indian-basin http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2011/12/03/for-free/ http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2011/12/03/for-free/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 23:21:42 +0000 heartsdeesire http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/?p=3751 ]]>

Joni Mitchell wrote a song “For Free” many years ago.  It was the song
about the sax (?) player, playing on a noisy street corner.  A song of how
everyone passed his music by.  That song left an indelible imprint, a resolve
in me to take less for granted.  I wanted to notice, to appreciate and to savor more.

This is also probably the number one tool that could get someone out
of a mild depression.  Just to make it your only job to look, to listen, to observe
the beauty and the wonder that abounds.

Did you know the average healthy mature oak tree has over 200.000 leaves?
That’s a lot of appreciation to go around.  And when they drop they give nutrients
to the soil, it’s a double dipper appreciation!

No one has counted the needles of a redwood but they produce over 100,000 cones a year, thus a single tree can produce over ten million seeds annually.  That’s one Fertile Myrtle (though technically not in the Myrtle family :))

For Free.

The air, your breath, your thoughts, your feelings, your talents, your beating heart
16 trillion behind-the-scenes processes in your body ….

For Free.

receiving and giving love, adoring anything or anyone for a millisecond or a life time
The man on the street corner strumming his guitar
a thank you, with the flesh of a palm reaching out to another palm
unexplained synchronicities and explained ones too
hugs and kisses

For Free.

the smells of freshly cooked food
the admiration for the time and talent that went into that food
including the appreciation for the plants and animals that provided this nourishment

For Free.

Your body as your temple
The song of the meadowlark in the distance
or the song of crisp clean sheets snapping across the air
the shore seagulls scurrying for fresh food at low tide
the water of which we are made
and the formlessness to which we return

What about love?

Deeply, passionately enamored with something, anything

Love will find you in the innocence of night and re-kindle that spark

The very scent of desire wafts about your nose and beckons you to come hither

Now from behind you, you hear the slow steady insistent beat of a rhythm

You’ve heard this rhythm before, it’s the one that calls you out towards being something more

You breathe in sync to the rhythm with this river of breath and it pulls you in so slowly, so seductively

You can no longer contain it, deny or delay it.

This is what you came here for, to ride the wings of desire, to gallop across a sky and paint it with the rainbows of your heart’s desire

Now when you lose touch with this passion, remember this place,
be ever faithful to your heart’s calling.

It is as vast as infinity and as wide as your love for it.

After the storm, a rainbow comes – someone has painted their glory across the sky.

They say don’t die with your music still in you.

I say don’t die with your heart’s desires still in you.