Humility - Brian Doyle

 

You cannot control anything.
You cannot order or command everything.
You cannot fix and repair everything.
You cannot protect [people] from pain
and loss and tragedy and illness.
You cannot be sure you will always be
employed, or healthy, or relatively sane.

All you can do is face the world with quiet grace.

When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story
in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or
several at once, sometimes;  when we are older we take on
other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you
and I both know men and women who become trapped in
the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately
imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives simply to
escape who they no longer wish to be;  but finally, I think, if
we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with
humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief....
and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and
true about humility.

Humility does not mean self abnegation, lassitude, detachment;
it's more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which
does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly
ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture.  You
must trust that you being you matters somehow...

[and that]

.....pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy...

[and]
You do your best to reach out tenderly and touch and elevate as
many people as you can reach...

You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath
you draw.  Humility is the road to love.  Humility, maybe, is
love.  That could be.  I wouldn't know; I'm a muddle and a 
conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder,
trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards
of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.

Brian Doyle

Excerpts from the chapter - "The Final Frontier"
From: One Long River Song

~

Photo from the Internet

Embracing Humanity's Pain - a meandering...

I wrote this piece about 13 years ago in the aftermath of Hurricane
Sandy that devastated parts of the Northeast in the U.S.  It seemed
relevant to resurrect it with what is going on in the world today,
with floods, fire, famine and ongoing, endless wars -
the state of humanity...

~

The images on TV back then of people on the East coast left broken
 and brokenhearted - calling out for assistance, as if they had been
abandoned - touched my heart, touching that same feeling of
abandonment deep within myself somewhere.  And I wonder, how
could I live in a contemplative bubble that I am wont to do - close
myself off to what is happening in the world, under the guise of
"spirituality"?  I can't.  There is no either/or.  It's all one Life living
ItSelf out here - just as it is...  Pain and Peace...  And maybe it's
really that I want to protect myself from feeling my own pain.
That's what global pain does.  It gets us in touch with our own
pain, our own vulnerability, our own helplessness to know what
to do for a hurting world, let alone our own pain.

I saw a woman on TV back then helping in the clean-up effort in
her own coastal town - crying - saying - "I want to go home, but
there is no home.  It's gone."  I turned away and cried silently in
my heart.  I can't imagine the devastation to the psyche that no
amount of religious platitudes of non-attachment, or non-dual
refrains of: there is no "me" who wants to go home - can assuage.
It is a deep wound of the heart to lose one's sense of "Home" -
to *feel* that sense of separation and loss.  I'm sure some have
 felt that in one form or another at some time in our lives,
whether it was a loss of a physical place, a person, or an
emotional/spiritual sense of "Home" - that led to a sense of
 deep "homesickness" of the heart.

And a lot of us know people in our daily lives who need our
empathy and our compassion, who have lost their sense of
"Home", feeling abandoned by "God" (however we know that
to be) - losing that felt sense of connection adrift in their lives. 
 I understand this deep wound.  I know such people. 
 I've been there.  I empathize.
  It is a helpless feeling not knowing how to help them. 
 It's as if some people's pain is so deep , it cannot be mended. 
 It is not a tangible "fix" on a practical level, or seemingly a
"spiritual"one either.  It is a deep pain of the psyche.   
It is a loss of "Home" - a loss of one's internal bearing of the
Spirit;an insatiable pain that no one and nothing can fill.  I'm
sure you've met them too. The ones whose hearts cry the cry
of desperation in a dark wilderness of the mind, like sleep
 deprivation, leaving a deep hollow hunger within. 
 How do we help these wounded wanderers?
  Like the displaced people of Palestine, and
 Ukraine, in their current reality... 
Breaks my Heart again...

It all trickles down, pain upon pain - or maybe I sound too morbid -
too dramatic...  But it's true.  We are all impacted by the pain of
others, by the global, collective pain of a wounded world.  One
person's pain affects us all.  And yet, many times, as I have
discovered, we are helpless to end the pain, and so we distract
ourselves from the pain, theirs and our own, by shutting it out,
and shutting down; by pretending that it is all a grand illusion,
a dream that we can detach from.  I have done it too, not wanting
to experience the pain.  But the pain ripples out anyway - through
humanity.  How can we *not* be affected - how can we not allow
ourselves to *feel* it...

Humanity's pain *is* my/our pain.  It's all a reflection.  And lofty
beliefs and "spiritual" words are dismissive, not helpful, because
they cannot be heard, or received by those caught in their deep pain...
Humanity's pain needs the embrace of an empathetic heart of
compassion...

~

There's nothing I can offer
that buffers the pain
that softens the heartache,
or heals the wounds -

And yes, at times I don't want
to feel others' pain,
because it is too overwhelming...

And because I have my own pain.

And what to do with that as well...

I sit with it and let it speak,
let it cry,
let it take me to the "mothering":
womb of the Silence of all Life,
and rest there - waiting;
petitioning the Cosmic Energies,
neither male nor female,
to intervene,
on behalf of
a suffering world.

Sometimes
that's all I can do...

When the "practical"
fails to touch the soul...

We pray...

And that is our offering
of love...

Mystic Meandering
2012

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Reality Rupture - Pema Khandro Rinpoche

The Tibetan term bardo, the "intermediate state" [or the
in-between state], is not just a reference to the afterlife.  It
also refers more generally to moments when gaps appear,
inter-ruptions to the continuity that we otherwise project onto
our lives.  The interruptions in our normal sense of certainty
are what is being referred to by the term bardo.  To be precise,
bardo refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality

and it is no longer available to us. [there is no going back].  
There is a total rupture in our who-I-am-ness.

We have been holding onto the idea of an inherent continuity
in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves on
artificial ground.

Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss knows what it
means to be disrupted...  In these moments we lose our grip on
the old reality and yet have no sense what a new one might be
like.  There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point -
there is, in a sense, no rest.

There is rupture in our reality...

A direct experience of disruption felt a the core of our being,
and there is no longer any use manufacturing artificial security.

The bardo teachings are really about recognizing the value of 
giving up the game, which we play without even knowing it.
We hold pictures/images of our ideal self in an ideal world.  We
imagine that if we could only manipulate our circumstances or
other people enough, then that ideal self could be achieved, and
in the meantime we pretend to have it together... and pursue
reality as we think it should be...

When we suffer disruption. we find we just can't play the game
anymore.  Holding it all together is not an option.

Death and loss are great teachers, if we can open to the
experience of profound disruption.

Without some way of managing this experience, this unsettling
discontinuity, punctuated by occasional disruptions to the very
idea of our being, we never know if we are going to show up....

We contract with our wounded sense of self, and are dissociated
from our true nature, and make frantic efforts to create something
more ideal, more secure, more definite.

In a raw broken-open state, this place where we let go of all
games, there is actually a great sense of relief available to us,
a knowledge that we don't have to do it anymore - to *be* that;
and find way to disrupt our own habit of clinging to our
continuity story.

Emerging from the bardo, we reenter the flow of life with a
new sense of groundlessness: it is clear that "later" is not always
a luxury that will be available to us...  The perspective gained
in the bardo cuts through petty concerns.  It cuts through delusions
so that whatever we contact, we do so with raw presence, without
the denial of impermanence.  A new kind of openness becomes
available to us.

The rupture of the bardo inevitably leads to whatever is next and
appreciating the [losses] in our lives, and the bardo for what it is -
the pause - the end that clarifies what exactly we will now be
beginning...

Impermanence is not just an illuminator of loss.  It is the illuminator
of newness, the ever-unfolding moment and its creativity....

Pema Khandro Rinpoche

excerpts from
"Letting Go In the Bardo"

from Lion's Roar

[brackets mine]

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Blessing - John O'Donohue

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green 
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

John O'Donohue

written for his Mother
Original title "Beannacht - A New Year Blessing

~

One of the profound things that O'Donohue's
work suggests is that blessing doesn't erase difficulty,
but rather reaches deeper.  In his essay he argues:

"It [blessing] is not the invention of what is not there,
nor the glazed-eye belief that the innocent energy of goodwill
can alter what is destructive...   Blessing.....issues from the
confident depth of the hidden Self...  When you bless someone,
you literally call the force of their infinite Self into action."

Giving blessings relies on a double capacity.  Its task is to
simultaneously look outward and honor the reality of what is
happening, while looking inward to name the inner experience
and resources within, to make visible the invisible world...

...blessing is gratitude made manifest...

From an Essay by Brittany Deininger MA in theology
and Culture Alumni

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 
 

Suffering - Francis Weller

No one escapes suffering in this life.
None of us is exempt from loss, pain, illness and death.
How is it that we have so little understanding of [and empathy for]
these essential experiences?  How is it that we have attempted
to keep grief separated from our lives and only begrudgingly 
acknowledge its presence at the most obvious of time, such as
a funeral.

It is the accumulated losses of a lifetime that slowly weigh us
down - the times of rejection, the moments of isolation when we felt
cut off from the sustaining touch of comfort and love.  It is an ache
that resides in the heart, the faint echo calling us back to the times of
loss.  We are called back, not so much to make things right, but to
acknowledge what happened to us.

Grief asks that we honor the loss and, in doing so, deepen our
capacity for compassion.  When grief remains unexpressed, however,
 it  hardens, becomes as solid as stone.  We, in turn, become rigid and
stop moving in rhythm with the soul.... with the flow of life.  Grief is
part of the dance.

As we begin to pay attention, we notice that grief is never far from
our awareness.  We become aware of the many ways it arrives in
our daily lives. It is the blue mood that greets us upon waking.  It
is the melancholy that shades the day in muted tones.  It is the
recognition of time's passing, the slow emptying of our days.  It
is the searing pain that erupts when someone close to us dies -
It is the confounding grief when our life circumstances are
shattered by the unexpected....  the ground beneath us opens,
shaken by violent rumblings.  Grief enfolds our lives....

It is essential for us to welcome grief, whatever form it takes.
When we do, we open ourselves to our shared experiences in life.
Grief is our common bond.  Opening to our sorrow connects us
with everyone, everywhere.  There is no gesture of kindness that
is wasted, no offering of compassion that is useless.  We can be
generous to every sorrow we see.  It is sacred work.

Francis Weller

from The Wild Edge of Sorrow:
Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief;
The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Ruptured Reality - Pema Khandro Rinpoche

We are always experiencing births and deaths [and other significant losses].  There is something radical about these changes in our reality.  There is a total rupture in our 'who-am-I-ness', and we are forced to undergo a great and difficult transformation.

In bereavement, we come to appreciate at the deepest, most felt level exactly what it means to die while we are still alive.  These are the moments when gaps [or in-between states] appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives.  These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty are that state in which we have lost our old reality and it is no longer available to us.

Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss knows what it means to be disrupted, to be entombed between death and rebirth.  We often label that a state of shock [or fracture].  In those moments, we lose our grip on the old reality and yet have no sense of what a new one might be like.  There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point - there is, in a sense, no rest.  In that radical state of unreality we need - not just logic, but something beyond logic, something that speaks to us in a timeless, non-conceptual way.

The more we learn to recognize this sense of disruption, the more willing and able we will be to let go of this notion of an inherent reality and allow that precious pot to slip out of our hands.  Rupture is taking place all the time, day to day and moment to moment; in fact, as soon as we see our life in terms of successive changes, we dissolve the idea of a solid self grasping onto an inherently real life.  We start to see how conditional 'who-I-am-ness' really is, how even that does not provide reliable ground upon which to stand.

At times like this, if we can gain freedom from the eternal grasping onto who I am and how things are - our default mode - then we can get to the business of Being.  Until now, we have been holding on to the idea of an inherent continuity in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves...  By doing so, we have been missing the very flavor of what we are.

The cause of suffering can be boiled down to grasping onto [or believing in] a fictional, contrived existence.  But what does that mean?  If we really come to understand, then there is no longer even a container to hold together our normal concepts, to make them coherent.

Reality as we thought we knew it is disrupted; the game of contriving an ideal self is suddenly irrelevant.  We experience a disrupted reality, a direct experience of disruption felt at the core of our being.

When we suffer disruption, we find we just can't play that game anymore.  It's really about recognizing the value of giving up the game, which we play without even giving it a second thought.  But when we are severely ill, and we have to cede control over our own body to strangers, holding it all together is not an option.

There are times like these in our lives - such as facing death [or other losses] - when we are no longer able to manage an outer image, no longer able to suspend ourselves in pursuit of the ideal self.  It's just how it is.  In these times of crisis we just don't have the energy to hold it all together.  When things fall apart, we can only be who we are.  Pretense and striving fall away, and life becomes starkly simple.

The value of such moments is this:  we are shown that the game can be given up and that when it is, the emptiness that we feared, emptiness of the void, is not what is there.  What is there is the bare fact of being.  Simple presence remains - breathing in and out, waking up and going to sleep.  The inevitability of the circumstances at hand is compelling enough that for the moment, our complexity ceases.  Our compulsive manufacturing of contrived existence stops.  We're forced into non-grasping of inherent reality.  The contrived self has been emptied out along with contrived existence and the tiring treadmill of image maintenance that goes along with it.  What remains is a new moment spontaneously meeting us again and again.  There is an incredible reality that opens up to us in those gaps if we just do not reject rupture.

But what's underneath our experience of rupture?  If here is no inherent existence to hold on to, then what is the ultimate reality?  This unanswered question drives a lot of us.  If we don't know the answer, then life becomes a primordial anxiety...  The extent to which we know [experience] what's underlying everything - is the extent to which life becomes bearable.

In the raw, broken-open state, this place where we let go of all the games, there is actually a great sense of relief, a knowledge that we don't have to do that anymore, to be that.  There can be a feeling of getting to the heart of things, a juxtaposition [a reorientation] of real and unreal.  That's the beauty of not grasping onto inherent reality.  If we can find ways to disrupt our own habit of clinging to our continuity story, to just strip it all down, then what we find in any bare moment is creative, instantaneous playfulness.

Emerging from the [in-between state], we re-enter the flow of life...  A new kind of openness becomes available to us.  We have lost our delusions of our contrived self image and a secure and solid state of reality and value the pause of the [in-between] as it makes apparent the Silence that underlies everything - that makes all sounds more vivid, and clarifies the end that we will now be beginning...

Pema Khandro Rinpoche
Excerpt from - "Breaking Open in the Bardo"
article in Lion's Roar

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
(color digitally inverted)

 

The Dakini Speaks - Jennifer Welwood

My friends...
Let's stop pretending we don't know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven't noticed, let's wake up and notice.
Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It's simple - how could we have missed it for so long?
Let's grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please. let's not be so shocked by them.
Let's not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.
Impermanence is life's only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.
To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion exquisitely precise:
Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.

This is the true ride - let's give ourselves to it!
Let's stop making deals for safe passage:
There isn't one anyway, and the cost is too high.
We are not children anymore...

Give everything for what cannot be lost...

Jennifer Welwood

~

Personal Note: I had to look up what a Dakini is :)
A Dakini, in the Tibetan tradition means "sky dancer/walker"
and is a tantric deity that might best be described as a female
embodiment of enlightened energy.  Dakinis are energetic
being in female form, evocative of the movement of
energy in space.

~

Photo Art - Mystic Meandering

Primal Energy

 

The Horizon of Life - Halifax & Willis

Our priorities shift as we see the horizon of life that is the
threshold of death...

Joan Halifax
Zen Buddhist
Director of Upaya Center
Author of Being with Dying

~

At the end of life or if we become sick, [or in the aging process]
we begin to let go of the roles that previously offered significance,
status and definition; the losses of position, responsibilities,
self-image, etc.  We become informed by internal rather than external
 concerns.  How we work with these losses and still find meaning
 will shape and inform how we close our lives...

Claire B. Willis LICSW

From - Lasting Words

~

I interviewed a woman who was terminally ill.

'So', I tried delicately to ask, 'What is it like to wake up every
morning and know that you are dying?

'Well', she responded, 'What is it like to wake up every morning
and pretend that you are not?'"

-unknown

 

Grief is Sacred - Francis Weller

No one escapes suffering in this life.
None of us is exempt from loss, pain, illness and death.
How is it that we have so little understanding of these
essential experiences?  How is it that we have attempted to
keep grief separated from our lives and only begrudgingly
acknowledge its presence at the most obvious times, such
as a funeral?

'If sequestered pain made a sound,' Stephen Levine says,
'the atmosphere would be humming all the time.'

It is the accumulated losses of a lifetime that slowly weigh
us down - the times of rejection, the moments of isolation
when we felt cut off from the sustaining touch of comfort
and love.  It is an ache that resides in the heart, the faint echo
calling us back to the times of loss.  We are called back, not
so much to make things right, but to acknowledge what
happened to us.

Grief asks that we honor the loss and, in doing so, deepen
our capacity for compassion.  When grief remains unexpected,
however, it hardens, becomes as solid as stone.  We, in turn,
become rigid and stop moving in rhythm with the soul...

When our grief stagnates, we become fixed in place, unable
to move and dance with the flow of life.  Grief is part of
the dance.

As we begin to pay attention, we notice that grief is never 
far from our awareness.  We become aware of the many ways
it arrives in our daily lives.  It is the blue mood that greets us
upon waking.  It is the melancholy that shades the day in
muted tones.  It is the recognition of time's passing, the slow
emptying of our days.  It is the searing pain that erupts when
someone close to us dies....  It is the confounding grief when
our life circumstances are shattered by the unexpected.....

It is essential for us to welcome our grief, whatever form it
takes. When we do, we open ourselves to our shared
experiences in life. Opening to our sorrow connects us with
everyone, everywhere.  There is no gesture of kindness that is
wasted, no offering of compassion that is useless. 
We can be generous to every sorrow we see.
It is sacred work.

Francis Weller
from - The Wild Edge of Sorrow

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Turning Into The Not-Knowing - Matt Licata

There is a certain death that occurs as part of the healing
process, a part of us unable to survive illumination.  As we
turn the light around, according to one Daoist alchemical
text, a piece of soul will fall away.

While it is tempting to spin out of the uncertainty and
quickly into rebirth, there is wisdom and purity within
the reorganization which we cannot bring into embodied
knowing if we patch it all up prematurely.

The dissolution itself is initiation as it offers vision and
feeling not available in the put-back-together-state.  An
old part of ourselves that has accompanied us for so long,
a fellow traveler is no longer permitted to continue the
journey by our side.  This prior soul-companion can be
another person or it can be a member of the inner family.

Somehow, we're asked to bear witness to the crumbling of
an old dream - my life and the way I was so sure it was
going to turn out.  This is the holy alchemical operation of
putrefactio, a sacred process that is evidence of.....fierce grace.

In order to be initiated, we must slow down, and turn into
the not-knowing.  To take some time to mourn the
reassembling of our world,  to grieve all that we will
inevitably lose as we heal and awaken.

To tend to the pieces of the soul, the shards of the heart,
and the fragments of the psyche that are being rearranged,
to honor the role they have played, for standing by us for
so long, and providing refuge during difficult times.

To lament the loss of their companionship and allow them to
continue into whatever realm is next for them, [and give them]
permission to travel and experience new things.  Even if we
 are unable to "accept" this, we can touch the ground where
 they once were, and bow.

To stand in awe at this process, despite the profound pain and
grief, to care for all of it as we allow the Mystery to reveal
itself in deeper and deeper ways.  To know that healing and
awakening is messy, glorious, and full-spectrum... and is not
only an act of creation, but one of destruction as well.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Loss Teaches You Everything - Issa

I lost many things in Costa Rica: physical stuff, psychological
baggage, spirituality (the idea that there is someone who should
get enlightened), weight, conditioning, civilization (the idea that
there is a certain way to be civilized, a norm to live by), 
domestication (the idea you should own a house/property and
own many physical things in order to be secure), sentimentality
of romance (it's apparently part of the play to have this experience
yet it has lost its sentiments).

It's when all is lost that all is found.  
When the illusion of the one who is doing her best to be in control,
to do the 'right thing', is gone.  When she is apparently gone life just
 flows magically, completely empty (nothing can be held onto,
prevented to change) yet fulfilling every need and desire as there
are no particular demands from anyone.  Life fulfills life as water
endlessly keeps flowing from a well to the sea.

Issa from Costa Rica

via - Uradiance

Photo - from Love is a Place

 

Because We Are Human - Dr. Jacqui Lewis

I think grief puts us in touch with our vulnerabilities.
I think the feeling of grief lets us know the power of wounds
to shape our stories.  I think it lets us know how capable we
are of having our hearts broken and our feelings hurt.

I think it lets us know the link that we each have because we're
human.  Because we're human, we hurt.  Because we're human,
we have tears to cry.  Because we're human, our hearts are
broken.  Because we're human, we understand that loss is a
universal language.  Everybody grieves.

All humanity grieves,  All of us have setbacks, broken dreams.
All of us have broken relationships or unrealized possibilities.
All of us have bodies that just don't do what they used to do.
Though grief is personal, every person grieves.

Dr. Jacqui Lewis

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Melancholy - Fred LaMotte

 Even on the most radiant days, there is a sorrow at the heart
of life.  When we deny it, the day becomes a desperate quest
for happiness, and the night is long.  But when we absorb the
trough into our rhythm, like the shadow of the breath, that
benign negation infuses all things with spaciousness, tinges
creation with golden poignancy, like Autumn itself.
What is heavy is not sadness, but the denial of sadness.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance
original title - "Autumn"

~

For all those tasting the sadness of these
unimaginable strange times that we are living through -
not only the losses from COVID, but
from the devastating fires on the West Coast, and the
hurricanes on the Gulf Coast affecting so many lives,
as well as the racial unrest, and the political upheaval
across this country.
May we all find the deep Quiet within..

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Sunset Heart Leaves

Grief as passageway of the Soul - Matt Licata

Grief is not something we "get over" by following pre-prescribed
stages, but a partner that we dance, play, honor, argue and weep
with as the cycles unfold.  It's appearance and the ways it longs
to be tended are unique for each psyche, heart, and nervous
system.

The timeline for this voyage is not knowable by the psychiatric
community, nor by insurance panels, or teachers of spirituality,
but is birthed in the heavens.  To rush, force, or pathologize
the experience of grief is to work against nature.

The grieving process [for all forms of loss] may not have an
endpoint or state of completion in which we come to some final
resolution, where we "finish" and land in some untouchable [more
spiritual] place, free from our embodied vulnerability, somatic
aliveness, and from falling apart and breaking open yet again.

While some may hold this fantasied end state as a goal which
comes about as we "master" [or "spiritualize"] life, the heart is
not interested in mastery.  But in entering the mystery in more
subtle and sensitive ways.

The heart itself is endless, and the visitors of grief may companion
us in their various forms for a lifetime.  Not come to harm, but
to reveal a portal into depth.  Shifting shapes, circulating, and
rotating, as they open and close passageways in the landscape of
the soul.

Grief is not so much a process that we "make it through", but a non-
linear unfolding, shepherd and emissary of the unknown.  It moves
not by way of straight line, but by that of circle and spiral.

Matt Licata

~

It is not an error
that you have been born
 a sensitive human being,
with a tender nervous system
and a heart that is sometimes
broken.

The tenderness there,
the shakiness, the grief...

not an error
to be remedied

or cured...

[or spiritually bypassed]

But a doorway to Essence,
a portal to Life.

Matt Licata

Loss after Loss - Mark Nepo

...Somehow we go on
loss after loss, like seeds
drowning in their possibilities
under all that snow.

From a distance, stars
are pins of light
pushing back the dark. 

But inside, each
is a world of light.

And the Spirit we carry -
that carries us - flares like a
star, everywhere we go pushing
back the pain and loss.

Still, a star can't be seen
without its covering of night,
nor a soul without its
human skin.

I don't know why -
It has nothing to do with
optimism or pessimism
or with triumph and defeat.

More, the impressible reach
of a beam of light entering the
darkest place it can find,
because that is how it
fulfills itself.

Mark Nepo
Excerpt from "Still"
From: Inside the Miracle

~

...[when the heart] is ripped apart
nothing makes sense while
in this re-arranging pain.
Nothing.
No matter what others say,
nothing is of comfort while
the heart is reforged in
the furnace no one asks for.

...Against our will, our heart
is remade by the angel of grief
who grips the center of our life,
shaking everything dead within us
from our branches, until
the heart condenses into a diamond.

Hard as this is to endure,
this too is a miracle.

Mark Nepo

Excerpts from: "After Mira"

From: Inside the Miracle.

~

Photo: Mystic Meandering

For Grief - John O'Donohue

When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid and undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.

Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And, when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From the gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
in your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return...

John O'Donohue

from: To Bless the Space Between Us

~

Photo - from Keukenhof Tulip Garden in Holland
by Ellen Ratmeyer

~

The world still grieves its losses...
And the hatred and tragedies that keep occurring...

Why I Sit in "Silence"...

I come to sit - to rest in the deep Quietness...

To sit with uncertainty,
with the fear and anger,
if they arise again, as they
most certainly will.

I come to sit - to mourn the losses of life
and losses of the ways of life;
to mourn the living and the dead,
for the suffering they have endured;

and for the grief - unending grief.

I come to sit - to feel the depths of healing Silence,
the deep Stillness;
to lay the burdens of the heart down
and just rest...

Mystic Meandering
April 30, 2020

~

Photo - Meditating Monks Mandala

?date

Embrace the Losses - John O'Donohue

May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence,
that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.
May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere,
where the presences that have left you dwell..
May you be generous in your embrace of loss.
May the sore well of grief turn into a seamless flow
of presence.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and
twilight are one - within the Great Belonging.

John O'Donohue
from: To Bless the Space Between Us

Original title: A Blessing for Absence

~

In memory of my mother
who passed from this life into
the "secret Elsewhere"
one year ago today...

~

And this goes out to all
who have experienced loss
around the world in our ongoing
coronavirus crisis...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
"Mom's last wave"

Loss - Richard Wehrman

More and more he felt
that those things he thought
he controlled, those powers
he believed he once had, were
slipping away; his capacities
to do diminished, his thoughts
multiplied and went in their
own directions, his ability to
remain one-pointed, to
meditate, ended in sleep.  He
judged himself harshly, but
letting that go, he found he
ended up with less and less,
whereas when he was younger
his imagination told him, by
this time, he would be stronger,
more focused, accomplished
in wisdom and knowledge.
Yet here he was, a snowman
melting away.....
This black mood matched
the time of year, and that was
reassuring: to understand
that everything is stripped
away before anything new
can be born.

Richard Wehrman
from: Being Here

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Snow Bunny - eventually
took shelter in the brush
near the tree. 

The Guest - Kabir

The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure [despair] goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no-one has shaken,

inside "love" there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through with in all parts by a
single sort of love.

How hard it is to feel that joy in all our bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word "reason" you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs [poems] are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out. [birth and death].

Kabir

from: Ecstatic Poems

Thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

The following is part of a commentary on the above poem
that I found this morning on line.  Author Unknown...

~

God is already in you; the True God, not the man made
image of God, not god of the temples, and the churches,
and the synagogues and the mosques and the gurudwaras...

The god that man has imagined in his own image, the god
that man made according to his own wishes, the god that is
nothing but the projection of man's mind and desires...
  That god never really existed.[because "God" is much
vaster than our personal limited images of who/what
 "God"is.]
The untrue [image] MUST cease for the truth to be.

Those who know the True God, know God as the fragrance
of life, the perfume of existence, the very ground of being.
For them God is not a concept, not a theory, not a hypothesis.
For them God is an existential experience.  For them God
is not separate from man, for them God is man's innermost
core...  God is nothing but your own depth [your Core Being]
trying to manifest itself.  God is not an ideal.
God exists as you - as life.

Life is eternal.
Life is immortal.
It changes forms, just like the waves in the ocean go on changing
but the ocean remains.  Bodies come and go, but your innermost
[Being] remains always there.  And that is God.

God is not to be worshiped, but realized.  There is no need to make
temples for God.  You have to learn to look within.
The temple is already there; It cannot be destroyed.

God is always your interiority...

The Guest is within you, but you have to turn in...
You have to become more conscious of your Consciousness.
You have to become more aware of your Awareness.
A point of stillness comes where you are simply aware of
your [inner] Awareness...

When Awareness [the Core Being] is the only content of your
awareness, that is the moment when The Guest is found...

author unknown