Love

John McAfee

“In a democracy, power is given not taken. But it is still power. Love, compassion, caring have no use for it. But it is fuel for greed, hostility,  jealousy … All power corrupts. Take care which powers you allow a democracy to wield.”

6.23.21

📿

Prime Minister of Bhutan:

“Happy to be observing a day that reinforces importance of health and replenishes our spirit during such stressful times. It reminds me of Shri Narendra Modi whose passion pushed him to propose this ancient tradition on the calendar.”

Change leads to disappointment if it is not sustained. Transformation is sustained change, and it is achieved through practice.”

-B.K.S. Iyengar

“A sustained yoga lifestyle is one that doesn’t fluctuate with the latest trends but is informed by the historic yoga philosophies of peace, no harm, discipline, and contentment.

We need to choose practices that are life affirming rather than draining in order for them to be transformative the practices we choose need to benefit not only our personal lives but our relationship with Gaia and with each other.”

-Cindy Senarighi and Heidi Green

If one knows what the particular disease is there is the possibility of curing it. To know the particular limitation, bondage or hindrance of the mind, and to understand it, one must not condemn it, one must not say it is right or wrong. One must observe it without having an opinion, a prejudice about it, which is extraordinarily difficult because we are brought up to condemn.

-J. Krishnamurti

“What would it mean to simply acknowledge our behavior without judgment, without denial, without hedging? Right now, in this moment, can you control your habitual responses to experience? Can any of us not be afraid?

As we observe other individuals, companies, political parties, and nations, we tend to bring the same kinds of judgments to bear, expecting different results.”

-Rolf Gates and Katrina Kenison

Go to the mat. -dayle

ℒℴve

Pride.

C

O

M

M

U

N

I

T

Y 

L O V E

T R U T H

Re-Release: The Stonewall Uprising/

You’re Wrong About Podcast

“In honor of Pride Month and revolutions past, present, and future, we’re re-releasing our episode on the Stonewall Uprising. Let the sunshine in.”

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/re-release-the-stonewall-uprising/id1380008439?i=1000476881136

One love.

One love, one heart
Let’s join together and a-feel all right
One love (hear my plee)
One heart
Let’s join together and a-feel alright
Let’s join together (let’s just trust in the Lord)
And a-feel all right (and I will feel alright)

Five years ago in Orland, Florida, one 29-year old man with an automatic military weapon massacred 49 people and wounded 53 more at a gay night club called Pulse.

From the White House on Saturday, June 12, 2021:

In the coming days President Joe Biden will sign a bill designating Pulse Nightclub as a national memorial, enshrining in law what has been true since that terrible day five years ago: Pulse Nightclub is hallowed ground.

We must also acknowledge gun violence’s particular impact on LGBTQ+ communities across our nation. We must drive out hate and inequities that contribute to the epidemic of violence and murder against transgender women – especially transgender women of color. We must create a world in which our LGBTQ+ young people are loved, accepted, and feel safe in living their truth. And the Senate must swiftly pass the Equality Act, legislation that will ensure LGBTQ+ Americans finally have equal protection under law.

In the memory of all of those lost at the Pulse nightclub five years ago, let us continue the work to be a nation at our best – one that recognizes and protects the dignity and safety of every American.

In the name of love. 

The Equality Act is in limbo. A lot is at stake for the LGBTQ community, especially our youth.

After its passage in the House in February, the Equality Act (H.R. 5) has one more hurdle before reaching the desk of President Joe Biden — the Senate. If passed, among other things, it will amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes of people protected from discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, education and federally funded programs, and patch holes in current nondiscrimination protections.

-San Diego Union Tribune, Kimberly A. Ahrens 

Fr. Richard Rohr:

Love for one another. May we place our hope in what matters and what lasts, trusting in your eternal presence and love. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our suffering world.

Nonviolence starts when we learn how to love ourselves with compassion. Upon beginning shadow work and looking within myself, I was able to heal old wounds, relearn healthy boundaries and thought patterns. Complete love flows through all we say, do, think, and pray after taking steps of transformation. -Susan C./Center for Action and Contemplation

“Moments as big as years.” Virginia Woolf

A bakery lost a client when it made rainbow Pride cookies. So others bought every item in the shop.

Little did she know, though, that her post would go viral on social media and that the line outside the tiny bakery would stretch for several blocks the following day.

Though the bakery opened at 10 a.m., a crowd had already assembled outside the front door by 8:30 the next morning.

“That line brought me to tears. All those people standing in the rain, waiting so patiently to buy a cookie,” Cooley said. “We just wanted to be inclusive, and it was so heartwarming to see how many people felt the same.”
Over the following few days, a steady stream of hundreds of customers arrived to show their support.

“The line just never ended. I had people buying cookies for the person behind them, buying cookies and handing them out to the kids outside. It was beautiful.” Dolder said. “They weren’t going to let this little bakery take a financial hit for showing love and acceptance for the gay community.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/06/09/pride-month-rainbow-bakery-customer/

The day after Confections received backlash for supporting Pride Month, hundreds of customers lined up to buy cookies and show their support. (Jay Eagle)

Redeeming ℒℴve through the feminine.

[Image: Thomas Merton]

Cynthia Bourgeault:

“Mary Magdalene belongs to the great worldwide stream of spiritual awakening and has nothing whatsoever to do with organized religion.

If we are serious about activating Mary Magdalene’s wisdom presence within contemporary Christianity, the first step is to increase her visibility within the liturgy, particularly during Holy Week, where her presence is so crucial to understanding the Paschal Mystery as an act of redeeming ℒℴve.

I would like to see the entire Holy Week liturgy reframed around two parallel anointings…at Bethany and in the garden of the resurrection…which so powerfully convey the energy of transformative love.

Early Easter morning ceremonially enacted, rather than merely read, the gospel account of Mary Magdalene’s visit to the tomb. The basic ceremony, the Visitatio Sepulchri, has been around since the tenth century; it merely needs to be returned to active duty.

Mary Magdalene weaves into one whole cloth those strands that have traditionally been kept so stringently separated: conscious ℒℴve, healing, kenotic surrender, the feminine, singleness, transformation. To touch any part of the this hologram is to invoke all the rest.

We do not know for certain what happened to Mary Magdalene after the resurrection. The gospel bearing her name confirms that her spiritual leadership was honored in a least some circles of early Christianity. She may well have sojourned in France. What we do know for certain is that the fragrance of her presence did not disappear from Christianity. In mysticism and allegory, in art and folklore, in esoteric circles…all veiled, but pointing like a finger at the moon…her mysterious alchemical feminine was kept alive. Now at last, in our own times, it comes above ground again, asking us to awaken yet again to the morning of the resurrection and find ourselves in the garden, awaiting the encounter that can change our institutional hearts.

The imaginal realm is real, and through it you will never be separated from any one or anything you have ever loved, for ℒℴve is the ground in which you live and and move and have your being. This is the message that Mary Magdalene has perennially to bring. This is the message we most need to hear.”

‘In 591 Pope Gregory claimed that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute, a misconception that remains to this day. In 2016 she was named by the Vatican as the apostle of the apostles, their equal.’

-Written by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett. Directed by Garth Davis.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mary-magdalene-2019

“As someone who watched it twice in 24 hours, ‘Mary Magdalene’ moved me in a way that no previous film about Christianity ever has.

Mary finds a place in the world and a cause in which to place her profound empathy. She was not just any spectator, this telling argues, so much as proof that at the core of Jesus’ teachings is a feminine influence.” -Nick Allen

Very.

“Stay passionate and let’s do what we can to lift each other up! Life is so short.”

~Korby

Escalante, Utah, 1936. Dorthea Lange. Village dwelling.

‘What brings us to tears, will lead us to grace. Our pain is never wasted.’ -Bob Goff

It’s hard for us religious people to hear, but the most persistent violence in human history has been “sacralized violence”—violence that we treated as sacred, but which was, in fact, not. Human beings have found a most effective way to legitimate their instinct toward fear and hatred. They imagine that they are fearing and hating on behalf of something holy and noble: God, religion, truth, morality, their children, or love of country. It takes away all guilt, and one can even think of oneself as representing the moral high ground or being responsible and prudent as a result. It never occurs to most people that they are becoming what they fear and hate.

-Richard Rohr

Release the fear. Then, hate dissolves. What remains? Only love. -dayle

More from Fr Richard:

Simplicity of lifestyle and freedom from the competitive power game, which is where it all begins. It is probably the only way out of the cycle of violence.

I am like one, who sees in dream, and when the dream is gone an impression, set there, remains, but nothing else comes to mind again, since my vision almost entirely fails me, but the sweetness, born from it, still distils, inside my heart.

-Dante/Paradiso

Ketchum, Idaho. March 27th, 2021

Full Moon/Power Path:

‘…keep your focus on beauty and what is good in your life. Trust your intuition and your heart and always come from a place of compassion and love.’

Community Radio

Sally Kane, Chief Executive Officer National Federation of Community Broadcasters

#CommunityRadio

Pre-election prayer.

Blessings from the Native American/Indigenous Ministries

of the Episcopal Church

“Come near now, saints of every tribe and clan, come closer, drawn by the flame of our prayers, called by the hearts of your family still here on Earth. You know how much we need you. You know how much these coming days mean to us. Come down from all four sacred directions, elders of every nation, come walking on the air, with your shining faces set toward the shadows, casting hope with every glance, reminding us of your presence, showing us the power of what we pray. Come near to us, you host of goodness and mercy, surround us with your love, and hold us up as we walk the blessing way, the path the Spirit has set before us, the tomorrow that waits for us to discover. Lift us up to ride your wings, that we may raise the banner of light, inviting all of your relatives to sing the hymn of hope, to begin a new dance that will not end, to be like you: unafraid and forever believing.”

The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston

Pray for peace.

❀

Finding a little bit of compassion where ever we can.

Korby Lenker.

All people.

4th of July

‘There is only one true flight from the world: it is not an escape from conflict anguish, and suffering, but the flight from dignity and separation, to unity and peace in the love of other [people].’

-Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation

What Dorothy Day called ‘a revolution of the heart’ is blossoming in our streets, where revolutionaries seem confident America can spend less on war and police, make the 1% and corporations pay their fare share and ensure healthcare, living wages, etc., for all. -Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

NPR

Frederick Douglass’ Descendants Deliver His ‘Fourth Of July’ Speech

How can you watch and not weep? 4th of July belongs to all of us. It must.

‘In this short film, five young descendants of Frederick Douglass read and respond to excerpts of his famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” which asks all of us to consider America’s long history of denying equal rights to Black Americans.’

Douglass Washington Morris II, 20 (he/him) Isidore Dharma Douglass Skinner, 15 (they/their) Zoë Douglass Skinner, 12 (she/her) Alexa Anne Watson, 19 (she/her) Haley Rose Watson, 17 (she/her)

Love will rise above all.

Sun Valley, Idaho.

Basarab Nicolescu

?

A “STOP!” – planetary and individual*

Basarab Nicolescu

‘Everything happens as if a “STOP! had been given on a planetary level. Of course, it was not this summary and unconscious entity of the infinitely small, the coronavirus, which gave this order. This order seems to emanate from the cosmic movement itself disturbed by the mad dream of the human being to dominate and manipulate Nature.

Everything stopped suddenly for half the countries of the world. This immobility did not fail to reveal to us all the flaws of globalization centered on profit and money. But which of the world’s politicians and leaders will be the ones to see? We are plunged into the blindness of the darkness of our habits of thought and the ideologies of progress, totally out of step with reality. How do you open your eyes to what’s going on? In my opinion, the only solution is the spiritual evolution of the whole of humanity. It alone could take into account all the levels of Reality and the Hidden Third.

It also happens as if a “STOP! had been given on an individual basis. We are suddenly in front of ourselves, before the mystery of our being, thus giving the exceptional opportunity of a spiritual evolution for each of us. This spiritual evolution of each human being conditions that of humanity.

We thus discover that the spiritual underdevelopment of the human being and humanity is the real cause of the crisis that we are going through and that we are going to go through.

But what spirituality is it? It is a radically new, transreligious and transcultural spirituality. Transdisciplinarity offers the tools for the establishment of such a spirituality, based on the community of destiny of all beings on earth. Two thousand years ago, the greatest visionary of all time, Jesus, asked “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44).

Without love nothing is possible to act on our destiny.

The world at the time refused such a message and preferred to kill Jesus. Two thousand years later, we are in exactly the same situation, on the brink of self-destruction of the species, a danger increased since by technological development and the immense means of destruction. The anthropocene without spiritual dimension will lead us to the brink of the abyss.

We must make, with great humility, a new pact of partnership with Nature and with all beings on earth – humans, animals, birds, trees, plants. We must stop defiling Nature with our excessive pride and our desire for omnipotence. All war should be declared a crime against humanity and all means of destruction should be destroyed.

All this can be understood as a utopia which goes against the principle of reality.

One possible answer is that of Michel Houellebecq: “I don’t believe in statements like” nothing will ever be the same again “. We will not wake up, after confinement, to a new world; it will be the same, only a little worse ”. If we contemplate the behavior of political leaders and public opinion in this period of crisis, it is to be feared that Michel Houellebecq is right. Politicians are returning to their usual language of mutual hostility and this will cause considerable social tension.

The media bombardment plunges us into an anxiety-provoking climate where, paradoxically, even death takes an abstract dimension: a dead person is just a number in a statistic. Nothing of the suffering of the one who dies, alone, suffocated by the coronavirus, reaches our place. This is glaring evidence of our spiritual underdevelopment.

The hidden hypothesis of Michel Houellebecq’s reasoning is the impossibility that human beings can evolve.

But another solution exists. Man must be born again if he wants to live.

Our task is immense. Let’s try not to be hypnotized by the multitude of doomsayers and apocalyptic thinkers of all kinds who predict the fall of the West and the demise of our world.

The word “Apocalypse” does not mean “end” or “destruction”, but “Revelation”. We are fortunate to have before our eyes, here and now, an extraordinary Revelation which can allow us to access Life and Meaning. I suggest reading, in these difficult times, the extraordinary book of Paule Amblard Saint John – The Apocalypse, illustrated by the tapestry of Angers [1]. Paule Amblard offers us a coherent interpretation of The Apocalypse of John by the necessity of the spiritual evolution of man. The appalling plagues which cross the text of The Apocalypse are, in truth, the torments of the human soul separated from what founds it. The Apocalypse of John is a message of longing and hope.’

[1] Paule Amblard, Saint Jean – L’Apocalypse, illustrée par la tapisserie d’Angers, Diane de Selliers Éditeur, Paris, 2017.

* Text translated from French by Gerardo del Cerro Santamaria.

Seth Godin:

Marketers used to have little choice. The only marketing was local. The local neighborhood, the local community.

Mass marketing changed that. Now, the goal was to flip the culture, all at once. Hit records, hit TV shows, products on the end cap at Target and national TV ads to support it all.

With few exceptions, that’s being replaced by a return to clusters.

The cluster might be geographic (they eat different potato chips in Tucscon than they do in Milwaukee) but they’re much more likely to be psychographic instead. What a group of people believe, who they connect with, what they hope for…

The minimal viable audience concept requires that you find your cluster and overwhelm them with delight. Choose the right cluster, show up with the right permission and sufficient magic and generosity and the idea will spread.

We’re all connected, but the future is local.

Footprints might be a fine compass, but they’re not much of a map. That’s on us.

More from Seth:

Mathematicians don’t need to check in with the head of math to find out what the talking points about fractions are this week.

That’s because fractions are fractions. Anyone can choose to do the math, and everyone will find the same truth.

Most of the progress in our culture of the last 200 years has come from using truth as a force for forward motion. Centralized proclamations are not nearly as resilient or effective as the work of countless individuals, aligned in their intention, engaging with the world.

We amplified this organizing principle when we began reporting on progress. If you’re able to encounter not just local truth but the reality as experienced by many others, collated honestly, then progress moves forward exponentially faster.

Show your work.

One of the dangers of our wide-open media culture of the last ten years has been that the signals aren’t getting through the noise.

Loud voices are drowning out useful ones. It’s difficult to determine, sometimes, who is accurately collating and correlating experience and reality and who is simply making stuff up as a way to distract us, to cause confusion and to gain influence.

I’m betting that in the long run, reality wins out. That the practical resilience that comes from experimentation produces more effective forward motion.

In the words attributed to Galileo, “Eppur si muove.”

It pays to curate the incoming, to ignore the noise and to engage with voices that are willing to show their work.

~

Thomas Merton:

The question arises: is modern man…confused and exhausted by a multitude of words, opinions, doctrines, and slogans…psychologically capable of the clarity and confidence necessary for valid prayer? Is he not so frustrated and deafened by conflicting propagandas that he has lost his capacity for deep and simple trust?

-Life and Holiness

Where men live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be greater sharing and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and cliches related over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The content din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible.

Each individual in the mass in insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesn’t hear, he doesn’t think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk, he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises. he does not think, he secretes cliches.

-New Seeds of Contemplation

Culture and Clichés correspondent Lynn Berger

We’re constantly told to try something new. ‘Innovate, don’t stagnate.’ But doing things two, three or 30 times creates space for reflection – and innovation. And it can even bring unexpected joy.

‘Politicians know that there are votes to be won with an appeal to what is old and familiar. And they know that this message is most effective when it is repeated endlessly: repetition is the foundation beneath propaganda.

So here’s the paradox: in order to appreciate repetition for what it is, we actually need a new sort of attention.

It’s probably impossible to achieve the level of attentiveness we bring to first times the tenth or hundredth time we do something. But it’s entirely feasible to look more attentively at repetition, not to see it as a stumbling block but as a goal in itself. Not as a copy but as a variation. I suspect that the routines and rituals that make up daily life, the “grind” we’ve learned to fear, would feel less like a slap in the face to the zeitgeist, and more like something worthwhile all on its own.

Repetition is the norm: we’re constantly repeating things, whether we want to or not. But there’s a difference between inattentively doing things again and doing things again by choice. Conscious, attentive, deliberate. With the full awareness that this matters just as much, and with the willingness to see, hear and feel different things when you feel, hear and see them again.’

https://thecorrespondent.com/455/once-more-for-feeling-why-trying-new-things-is-overrated-and-repetition-is-vital-to-society/60193938805-824daa94

A certain level of fatigue sets in. The media landscape has fragmented so much that consumers can filter their information diet to those outlets that reflect their worldview. 

Marianne Williamson

Dalai Lama

Change starts with us as individuals. If one individual becomes more compassionate it will influence others and so we will change the world.

‘A qualitative shift in our souls.’

#Bansky

Teach only love, for that is what you are. ~Course in Miracles

If one makes herself receptive to the idea of love, she becomes lovable. To the degree that she embodies love, she is love; so people who love are loved. ~Science of Mind

ℒℴve

Ghandi recognized, as no other world leader of our time has done, the necessity to be from from the pressures, the exorbitant and tyrannical demands of a society that is violent because it is essential greedy, lustful, and cruel.

He recognized the impossibility of being a peaceful and nonviolent man, if one submits passively to the insatiable requirements of a society maddened by overstimulation and obsessed with demons of noise, voyeurism, and speed.

Gandhi believed that the central problem of our time was the acceptance or the rejection of a basic law of love and truth which had been made knows to the world in traditional religions.

His whole, his political action, finally even his death, were nothing but a witness to this commitment: “If love is not the law of our being, the whole of my argument falls to pieces.”

-Thomas Merton, Seeds of Destruction

The most inward and loving of all,

he came forth like a new beginning,

the brown-robed brother [St. Francis] of your nightingales,

with his wonder and good will

and delight in Earth.

Rilke, The Book of Hours III, 33

This is the miracle of love: to discover that all creation is one, flung out into space.

[…] 

This is the principle of nonviolence, and I want to recommend it to you with all the enthusiasm I can command. . . .

If human beings go to war, it is because they fear someone.

Remove the fear, and you re-establish trust, and will have peace.

Nonviolence means destroying fear.

-Fr. Richard Rohr, Center for Action & Contemplation

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

—John Steinbeck, The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957)

Jennifer Rose.

Everything is sacred.

A valid voice.

Keep Marianne on the debate stage. Donate at marianne2020.com

https://www.marianne2020.com

‘To do the right and love goodness.’

You have been told . . . what is good
And what the Lord requires of you:
Only to do the right and to love goodness,
And to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

╭ღ╯

“It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”

“We ought to try, by the example of our own lives, to prove that life is love and wonder and that that nation is doomed which penalizes those of its citizens who recognize and rejoice in this fact.”

Timeliness from Baldwin, born on this day in 1924.

“I can conceive of no better service,” Walt Whitman wrote, “than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.” Nearly a century later, James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) — another poet laureate of the human spirit — embodied this ethos in one of his shortest, most searing, and timeliest essays.

“We are living through the most crucial moment of our history, the moment which will result in a new life for us, or a new death… a new vision of America, a vision which will allow us to face, and begin to change, the facts of American life… This seems a grim view to take of our situation, but it is scarcely grimmer than the facts. Our honesty and our courage in facing these facts is all that can save us from disaster. And one of these facts is that there has always been a segment of American life, and a powerful segment, too, which equated virtue with mindlessness… It always reminds me of a vast and totally untrustworthy bomb shelter in which groups of frightened people endlessly convince one another of its impregnability, while the real world outside — by which, again, I mean the facts of our private and public lives — calmly and inexorably prepares their destruction.”

“We must dare to take another view of majority rule… taking it upon ourselves to become the majority by changing the moral climate. For it is upon this majority that the life of any nation really depends.”

James Baldwin on Resisting the Mindless Majority, Not Running from Uncomfortable Realities, and What It Really Means to Grow Up

For Steve. And choice. And love.

“Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them – we can love completely without complete understanding.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through it 

Political possibility.

As I prepare for tonight’s debate, I am thinking about why I got into this race. I’m committed to articulating as strongly as I can my beliefs on which this campaign stands.

I believe we won’t be the country that we can be, until we’re the people that we can be. Too many people are held back from being all they can be, due to bad public policy that does more to limit their dreams than to unleash their spirits.

I believe government can and should be a force for good. It should create and secure opportunities for people to embrace the light, thus making it less probable they will fall into darkness.

America has now fallen into a dark night of the American soul. We’re living at a time when some of the worst human impulses have been turned into a political force. And that will be transcended only by the best human impulses turned into a political force.

That is why I take a stand for love.

I take a stand for economic and social justice. I take a stand for America’s children. I take a stand for safety. I take a stand for our planet.  I take a stand for racial reconciliation. And I take a stand for peace.

I will continue to do that, tonight in Miami, tomorrow in Homestead, and the day after that in Iowa. I will continue to campaign on the possibility that America can emerge from this time and be better than we have ever been.

Thoughts and meditations.

The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.

-Mark Nepo

It is the tending of our own souls that invites the natural process of love to begin. I remember my very first tumble into love. I found such comfort there that, like Narcissus, I became lost in how everything other than my pain was reflected in his beauty. All the while, I was addicting my own worth, empowering him as the key to my sense of joy.

If I have learned anything through the years, it is that, though we discover and experience joy with others, our capacity for joy is carried like a pod of nectar into our very own being. I now believe that our deepest vocation is to  root ourselves enough in this life that we can open our hearts to attract others. In other words, in being so thoroughly who we are, an inner essence is released that calls others to experience our personal light.

It seems the very job of being is to ready us for such love.

In this way, the Universe continues through the unexpected coming together of blossomed souls.

So if you can, give up the want of another and be who you are, and more than not, love will come at the precise moment you are simply in love with you. [Nepo]

Identify one trait makes you feel good about who are are: your laugh, your simile, your ability to listen, or the sound of your voice.

Notice how this effects others.

These small moments are the beginnings of love. They do not yet have definition.

Take a moment. Give thanks for your small goodness and for the potential love of others.

A hunger drives us.

We want to contain it all in our naked hands,

our bribing sense, our speechless hearts.

We want to become it, or offer it-but to whom?

We could hold it forever-but, after all,

what can we keep?

Not the beholding, so slow to learn.

Not anything that has happened here.

Nothing.

There are hurts. And, always, the hardships.

And there’s the long knowing of love-all of it

unsayable.

Later,

amidst the stars,

we will see: these are better unsaid.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, from the Ninth Duino Elegy

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle. 

-Plato

Science of Mind/Ernest Holmes:

This was the Christ speaking, the son begotten of the only Father-the Son of God. Humble in his humanity, compassionate in his tenderness, understand the frailties of the human mind, he let the Great Spirit speak through him, in words of love and sympathy. He proclaimed his divinity through his humanity and taught that all men are brothers.

Rev. Dr. David Goldberg:

The Sanskrit word karuna is translated as compassion, which means active sympathy or the willingness to bear the pain of others. Closely related to karuna is metta, loving kindness.

It’s important to remember also that genuine compassion is rooted in prajna or wisdom. Prajna is the realization that the separate self is an illusion. This takes us back to not attaching our egos to what we do, expecting to be thanked or rewarded.

In Essence of the Heart Sutra, His Holiness the Dalai Lama writes, “According to Buddhism, compassion is an aspiration, a state of mind, wanting others to be free from suffering. It’s not passive-it’s not empty alone-but rather an empathetic altruism that actively strives to free others from suffering. Genuine compassion must have both wisdom and loving kindness. That is to say, one must understand the nature of the suffering from which we wish to free others (this is wisdom), and one must experience deep intimacy and empathy with other sentient beings (this is loving kindness). [Right Action and Compassion, Barbara O’Brien, April 2018]

Love laughs.

But love laughs at the end of the world, because love is the door to eternity; and, before anything can happen, love will have drawn her over the sill and closed the door, and he won’t bother about the world burning because he will know nothing about love.

-Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas [1953]