April 2012
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“Silent dhikr is a matter of longing and remembrance, of submission to...”
– Coleman Barks, The Illuminated Prayer: The Five-Times Prayer of the Sufis (Beautiful. Thank you, silencesounds)
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“At the heart of the emptiness there is born in me a sudden understanding.”
– Fabienne Verdier (via awritersruminations)
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poem in your pocket day
In a dream I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far, and yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: “How you been?” He grins and looks at me. “I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees.”
–Wendell Berry, courtesy of Whiskey River & Poem in...
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“Along the river, over the hills, in the ground, in the sky, spring work is going...”
– John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (via litverve)
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Reflejos: Excerpt from Awaken to... →
Meditation is not so much a process of stilling the mind as of perceiving realities that exist beyond the mind. There is an inner world that can be perceived only when the attention has been turned away from material involvement and redirected toward the divine source within. “Listening” entails much more than listening with the ears. It means, among other things, the stillness of expectation, and...
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“What we must do,
I suppose,
is to hope the world
keeps its balance;
what we...”
– Mary Oliver, from “The Owl Who Comes” in New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
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“We’re fascinated by the words
but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”
– Ram Dass (with thanks to sleepinginthesnow)
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“In the act of writing the poem, I am obedient, and submissive. Insofar as one...”
– Mary Oliver on writing. Thank you, Whiskey River.
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“Suzuki Roshi used to say that what was needed most in the monastery were people...”
– Marian Mountain, The Zen Environment (h/t Joan Halifax)
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“If the heart wanders or is distracted,
bring it back to the point quite gently...”
– Saint Francis de Sales, with thanks to The Beauty We Love.
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“Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.”
– Meister Eckhart, from Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (Yes. Thank you, litverve)
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“But by far the most lovely thing I saw in Isfahan, one of those things where...”
– Vita Sackville-West, on the madrasseh of the Imam Mosque (formerly the Shah Mosque) in Isfahan, Iran, from Passenger to Teheran (Thank you, touba)
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“Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we...”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Thank you, liquidnight)
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To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
―Pema Chödrön
Thank you, 3wings.
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Above all else, we need to nourish our true self—what we can call our buddha nature—for so often we make the fatal mistake of identifying with our confusion, and then using it to judge and condemn ourselves, which feeds the lack of self-love that so many of us suffer from today. How vital it is to refrain from the temptation to judge ourselves or the teachings, and to be humorously aware of our...
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“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind...”
– Albert Camus, courtesy of riskywiver.
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“I don’t think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I...”
– Deborah Eisenberg
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“No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that...”
– W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (Damn. So great! Thank you, francine)
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Watch“In our prayers and devotions, we need to reconnect with the sacred substance in creation. We need to place the earth within our hearts, and nourish it with our love, and offer it in remembrance of God.”
–from chapter 6 in Prayer of the Heart in Christian & Sufi Mysticism, a new book by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. With thanks to Working with Oneness.
Also see our latest issue for Llewellyn...
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“On the death of any living creature the spirit returns to the spiritual world,...”
– Aziz Nasafi, a 13th century Islamic Persian mystic quoted in What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger in the chapter “The Arithmetical Paradox: The oneness of mind.” Pilfered from the excellent blog on Buddhism and Practice, 108ZenBooks.
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“I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.”
—Mary Oliver, from The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, and David Weiss (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995)
Thank you, apoetreflects.
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The World Loved by Moonlight
You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It is like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.
—Jane Hirshfield, “The World Loved By Moonlight” “Its source was a sentence written by Chekhov in a letter to a young writer: “If you want to move your reader, write more...
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some thoughts
I would like to read some thoughts which I believe are true:
There is no death. Life cannot die.
The coating uses up, the form disintegrates, but life is—is always there—even if for us it is the unknown.
We cannot know life. It would be pretense to say that we know what life is—what death is.
Some wise men have said that we can know life only after we know death. In any case, death is the...
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