If you're John Muir you want trees to live among. If you're Emily, a garden will do. Try to find the right place for yourself. If you can't find it, at least dream of it. ~ When one is alone and lonely, the body gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, or splashes into the cold river, or pushes through the ice-crusted snow. Anything that touches. ~ God, or the gods, are invisible, quite understandable. But holiness is visible, entirely. ~ Some words will never leave God's mouth, no matter how hard you listen. ~ In all the works of Beethoven, you will not find a single lie. ~ All important ideas must include the trees, the mountains, and the rivers. ~ To understand many things you must reach out of your own condition. ~ For how many years did I wander slowly through the forest. What wonder and glory I would have missed had I ever been in a hurry! ~ • Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still it explains nothing. ~ • The point is, you're you, and that's for keeps. [Photo: Lopez Island, San Juan's, Washington]
Mary Oliver
🌻
April 2, 2022‘For never was a horror experienced without an angel stepping in from the opposite direction to witness it with me.’
-Rilke
This is an incredible time where the opportunity to bring in miracles and magic is strong.
Power comes from spirit and your essence and is fed and supported by the elements and energies more powerful than you such as the sun, the earth, nature, the stars, your imagination etc. You can be empowered or allow yourself to be disempowered through a trauma, karma or lessons, but another person cannot truly give or take away your power as they cannot ever truly give you any.
We have a tremendous opportunity to move through this and access the amazing landscape of love.
-Power Path
Krista Tippett reflecting on her time with poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver.
Life had moved forward, as it does. It was now composed of ingredients, as it always is, that neither she nor I would have been able to imagine.
‘We’re in yet another moment in the life of the world where we might unsee the beauty or imagine it overshadowed, defeated, or simply less powerful than what would steal it from us, blot it out. What a gift to re-summon Mary Oliver’s presence for this time. I hope you feel that, too.”
Listen.
From Global Citizen ⭕️
APRIL 8TH, 2022
Center for Action & Contemplation
‘Our fears offer us an invitation to engage with the discomfort of the inner places. Will you give your fear a chance to speak to you?
Ask, What is this trying to show me? or What else might be going on? Give yourself some time, and delve into the fear.’
Catastrophization
And it’s exhausting. Catastrophe fatigue sets in, and we end up losing interest and drifting away, until the next emergency arrives.
Catastrophization ends up distracting us from the long-term systemic work we signed up to do. It’s a signal that we care about what’s happening right now, but it also keeps us from focusing on what’s going to happen soon.
The best way to care is to persist in bending the culture and our systems to improve things over time.
-Seth Godin
Magic.
June 23, 2021
Allysha Levino:
RIGHT NOW, those of us who are CHOOSING CONSCIOUSNESS are gathering our tools and training, trusting our intuition, and hoping that humans will make the great evolutionary leap toward a world that works for everyone.
Wherever this roller coaster takes us, we’re all in this together!
So here’s my BIG QUESTION for you today:
→ What are YOU Noticing?
- Are you sailing through feeling graceful?
- Are you seeing everything in the old paradigm that doesn’t work anymore?
- Is your body or mind struggling to make the leap?
- Are you feeling the tension of the widening gap?
Noticing can help us reach a place of equanimity no matter where we are on the journey… and wherever you are right now is perfect.
Notice. Trust. Breathe.
Allysha is the Founder of Real Life Magic
& Sacred Mystery Tours
It is important to consider what we might know about ourselves and how we interact or respond in the ways we do, or what we perceive or believe about our own faith, theology, and identity. As we endeavor to live fully into this notion of belovedness, we must be introspective and self-aware, carefully uncovering and discovering our most authentic selves while staying connected to Spirit, utilizing the resources of prayer and other spiritual practices. This is the basis of how we live out our spirituality.
Father Richard Rohr, Center for Action & Contemplation
Full moon update for Thursday, June 24th from Power Path:
This is an optimistic time, and could be very prosperous if you can move through the challenges of the distractions of drama and ego-driven negative behaviors in yourself and in others that may crop up. Honesty, emotional vulnerability, humility and a good spiritual base are important foundational aspects for success during this time. It can be a very expansive time especially if you can harness the positivity and optimism. It is a good time to reflect on the containers of your life. What is too small, too big, completed etc. We have some good momentum to initiate the creation of some new containers for ourselves for this cycle.
One the one hand you have the excitement and inspiration of a new container and new possibilities for expansion and partnerships. On the other hand, you may have the personal challenges of self doubt and sifting through some of the negative aspects of your personality that may get in the way of truth and clarity of intention. Even though the energy is moving more freely now, there is still some residual tension around restrictions, delays and right timing. Be patient, enjoy the process, love your friends and community, have a little gratitude, be creative.
The shadow he gave was was enormously devastatingly encompassing, and in the box the magnificent light revealed. I am grateful for gifts of darkness. -dayle
Our country’s soul runs deep.
September 30, 2020
He will watch as his towers crumble to the ground and we melt down the gold-tinted glass and steel to create a gorgeous bridge across our southern border. His golf courses will be transformed into highly diversified ecosystems where sophisticated natural reciprocity, not small men, reign. Everything he built his personal brand around–unlimited wealth and toxic masculinity and an anemic sort of freedom defined by individualism–will become compost for the new world we grow. His worldview will become so archaic as to be understood as the twisted mythology that it is.
-Courtney Martin, author and activist
[“Weird drawing I did while listening to the “debate” last night.” -Courtney]
https://www.courtneyemartin.com
“Some Pain is simply the normal grief of human existence. That is pain I try to make room for. I honor my grief.”
-Marianne Williamson
“What happens next depends on each one of us…and all of us together.”
-Upswell/Fetzer Institute
“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”
-Mary Oliver
“Stop grumbling among yourselves.”
-Gospel of John 6:43
“No miracles, please.
Just let your laws
become clearer
from generation to generation.”
-Rilke
“We can only consider things so long. After a while, all the information…all the options and opinions…will begin to weight us down. After our deeper eyes have seen the situation, all the well-meaning voices telling us what we should or should not do will start to feel like strings we can’t cut through.
The only way to know what awaits us is to live it.”
-Mark Nepo
This morning, finding peace in the chaos, calm in the inevitable. We will get through the pain and suffering the next few months politically and socially, and many more for COVID. Our country’s spirit runs deep. We know it will be painful and frightening. Yet, as Courtney Martin writes, all of this will become ‘compost for the new world we grow.’ We choose now, in this moment, how, and what, we want to grow.
-dayle
❀
Again.
September 4, 2019
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, The Jouney
Dayle’s Community Cafe is on hiatus until September 18th.
Blessings.
Jai.
❥
Mary. ღ
January 17, 2019Mary.
January 13, 2019
The Journey
by Mary Oliver
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.
-Mary Oliver
“We are who we protect. Who we stand up for.”
sohbet
“Sin as such does not exist. You only bring it into manifestation when you act in ways that are adulterous in nature. It is for this very reason that the Good has come among you pursuing its own essence within nature in order to reunite everything to its origin.”
“All of nature with its forms and creatures exist together and are interwoven with each other. They will be resolved back, however, to their own proper origin, for the compositions of matter return to the original roots of their nature. Those who ears, let them hear this.”
-Rabini
D’s Truck.
November 12, 2018Do you know what I noticed the other day? The light on the speedometer right above 45 mph is dimming. Coming home from the protest to protect Mueller, to remind anyone who would listen that no one is above the law, the light in the speedometer is dimming. “Oh no,” I thought, and gently patted the dashboard. D’s truck. 1994 black Ford Ranger…24 years old. My son is 24. I don’t want D’s truck to stop. Ever. It was my brother’s. The “Biter End” pin from the Gaslamp bar in San Diego is right where you left it, on the visor.
I walk through the world because I love it.
I walk through the world because I love it.
Mary Oliver.
That’s what I read on a wall as I walked by thinking of you. I think you loved it. The world. And it broke your heart. And it breaks mine.
-Dayle Ohlau, Santa Sabina Center
___
There is in all things
an invisible fecundity,
a dimmed light,
a meek namelessness,
a hidden wholeness.
-Thomas Merton
‘Anything that touches…’
October 29, 2016
Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way: A Poem
Eternity slowing reversing.
October 7, 2016
‘For as the Earth was begun like a dish breaking, eternity is that scene slowly reversing, and you and the things we’re drawn to are merely the pieces of God unbreaking back together.’
-Mark Nepo
Not a human love…
‘Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.’ <Mary Oliver>
…a love of life that that although pain – suffering – it is at its foundation an undeniable love of being.
‘The chance of a lifetime.
That would be today.
And every day, if you’re up for it.
The things that change our lives (and the lives of others) are rarely the long-scheduled events, the much-practiced speeches or the annual gala. No, it’s almost certain that the next chance you have to leap will come out of nowhere in particular, and you’ll discover it because you’re ready for it.
Someone to inspire, to connect with, to lead. A system to transform. An idea to share. Responsibility is often just lying around, waiting for someone to take it.’
-Seth Godin
September 28, 2016
A beautiful reminder to be tender with young hearts. And those still discovering.
❥
The creative experience.
July 6, 2016
(Illustration by Julie Paschkis from ‘Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People.’)
Rainer Maria Rilke
We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are — as far as we know — the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself. I don’t know that, but we’re made of the same stuff that stars are made of, or that floats around in space. But we’re combined in such a way that we can describe what it’s like to be alive, to be witnesses. Most of our experience is that of being a witness. We see and hear and smell other things. I think being alive is responding.
NPR
Elie Wiesel was called many things during his life. He liked to call himself simply a witness. And as a witness, he said, it was his duty to never let those who suffered be forgotten.
Jacob Needleman
American: guardian of the possibility of human beings to search for conscience.
Mary Oliver
Attention without feeling is only report.
Mark Strand
[When] you’re right in the work, you lose your sense of time, you’re completely enraptured, you’re completely caught up in what you’re doing, and you’re sort of swayed by the possibilities you see in this work. If that becomes too powerful, then you get up, because the excitement is too great. You can’t continue to work or continue to see the end of the work because you’re jumping ahead of yourself all the time. The idea is to be so… so saturated with it that there’s no future or past, it’s just an extended present in which you’re, uh, making meaning. And dismantling meaning, and remaking it. Without undue regard for the words you’re using. It’s meaning carried to a high order. It’s not just essential communication, daily communication; it’s a total communication. When you’re working on something and you’re working well, you have the feeling that there’s no other way of saying what you’re saying.
[…]
One of the amazing things about what I do is you don’t know when you’re going to be hit with an idea, you don’t know where it comes from. I think it has to do with language. Writers are people who have greater receptivity to language, and I think that they will see something in a phrase, or even in a word, that allows them to change it or improve what was there before. I have no idea where things come from. It’s a great mystery to me, but then so many things are. I don’t know why I’m me, I don’t know why I do the things I do. I don’t even know whether my writing is a way of figuring it out. I think that it’s inevitable, you learn more about yourself the more you write, but that’s not the purpose of writing. I don’t write to find out more about myself. I write because it amuses me.
[…]
I am always thinking in the back of my mind, there’s something always going on back there. I am always working, even if it’s sort of unconsciously, even though I’m carrying on conversations with people and doing other things, somewhere in the back of my mind I’m writing, mulling over. And another part of my mind is reviewing what I’ve done.
[…]
Keep your eyes and ears open, and your mouth shut. For as long as possible.
Virginia Woolf
Wave in the mind.
(Parts gratefully borrowed from Maria Papova.)