Monday, February 7th, 2022

“At least the global pandemic brought us all together.”

-Ricky Gervais

Rumi:

The human shape is a ghost

made of distraction and pain.

Sometimes pure light, sometimes cruel,

trying wildly to open,

this image tightly held within itself.

Emmanuel Macron, President of France:

“…a response that makes it possible to avoid war, to build the elements of confidence, stability and visibility. Together.”

Marianne Williamson:

“The role I want to play right now is citizen.”

“When we grant ourselves permission to live the life we want, there is little in the world that can stop us.” -Marianne

(C’est vrai.)

Reading this from Seth, reminded of Matthew’s book, which I loved. -dayle

Thomas Berry:

“We will not save what we do not love.”

And from Matthew Fox:

“In Invoking the divine feminine, Julian of Norwich is of course informing us about how we need a balanced sense of gender to survive and even thrive in a time of pandemic and after a pandemic has left us. […] All human life on the planet is born of woman.“

The purity of peace.

Bridge pose, Setu Bandha Sarvangasana.

This asana is often used as a transitional pose to realign the spine. Practice Bride with the shoulders flat on the mat, and press the feet into the mat as the hips are gently lifted. Relax your glutei, and notice that the the strength of the grounded shoulders and feet allows the heart energy to rise, bridging love. -Cindy Senarighi & Heidi Green

“Love is the bridge between you and everything.” -Rumi

Meditation on 

P

E

A

C

E

Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, B’ahi, Green Orthodox, Christian: The path of peace as we should all live. Let peace begin with us, on our mats, in our homes, on the job, and in the world. The way of peace taught by the prophet Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Be reminded as to our own role in bringing peace to this world, out of the ditches and onto the bridge of love.

☮️

Cut the wire.

‘The heart opens doors the mind can’t find.’

-Jennifer Rose

‘That barbed wire on your path is the mind. Cut the wire and your path clearly find. Heart trickster, soul veil and mind bind. To find the path you must put all three behind.’

-RUMI

Y

E

S

‘People’s beliefs about the world are only as reliable as the information system that shapes them and ours is completely and irredeemably broken.’

-Sean Illing, VOX

We need a new paradigm.

April 2nd, 2021

F

I

N

A

L

S U R R E N D E R.

❀

‘Kindness of the soul.’

Lawrence Ferlinghetti passed this week. He was 101. [1919-2021]

Ferlinghetti was a publisher, poet, and bookseller in San Francisco, publishing the controversial “Howl” by Allen Ginsburg that embraced and argued for our First Amendment rights.

F R E E D O M   O F    S P E A C H

‘Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!’

-Howl, 1956

From Jelani Cobb: “Not many people can say they both built an institution and become one.”

“There is a voice that doesn’t use words, listen.” -Rumi

It was in Ferlinghetti’s passing this week I gravitated to a film exemplifying the ‘kindness of the soul.’ Incredible filmmaking. ‘Nomadland’ [Hulu]. Here’s the trailer:

“What’s remembered, lives. I maybe spent too much of my life just remembering.”

This film broke me about seven different ways; it is extraordinary. It is beautifully written, directed, edited, and produced by Chloé Zhao.

[Frances McDormand and director Chloe Zhao.]

The film stars Francis McDormand and actor David Strathairn has a role, too. Remarkably and seamlessly, Zhao uses real folks to tell the story, their story, of the ‘workampers.’ They will find your heart, and stay.

The impetus for the film came from a Harper’s Magazine article by Jessica Bruder, “The End of Retirement: When you can’t afford to stop working,” published in 2014.

Later, Bruder would drive more than 15,000 miles in the camper van on a mission to follow the wanderers who would become the stars of her 2017 book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.”

See it. Share it. And maybe, even live it.

“Energy is like a muscle; it grows when we use it. We grow in our capacity to do the right thing each time we do the right thing.” -Rolph Gates

There is an expectation that the pandemic to create more nomads with an interest in the van-dwelling surge after the 2008 crisis, hardly letting up. Cost of housing being one major factor, but suggests another: disillusionment and dissatisfaction — with the American Dream and the evaporation of pensions. “The golden years were not going to be golden.”

“Nomadland” is nominated for four Golden Globes on Feb. 28: best picture, director, screenplay and actress, and is a strong contender for the Oscars in April.

https://www.nj.com/entertainment/2021/02/nomadland-is-an-oscar-contender-meet-the-nj-author-behind-the-film-and-her-van.html

Let’s meet there.

From the Center of Action & Contemplation:

The hearts of more and more children, young people, adults, and senior citizens are yearning for a new story, a story of love rather than hate, of creativity rather than destruction, of win-win cooperation rather than win-lose competition, of peace-craft rather than war-craft.

They are waiting for a new story to explore, inhabit, and tell.

We are all looking for a larger and more loving story in which to participate.

[Brian D. McLaren and Gareth Higgins, The Seventh Story: Us, Them, & the End of Violence]

From activist and author Courtney Martin:

We continue to build the country of our dreams, the one worthy of our children. We counter tantrums with tenderness towards those all around us. People are grieving. People are tired. The vast majority of Americans have spent almost a year largely inside of our homes, trying to keep one another safe, our lives turned inside out in an attempt to protect ourselves from life-threatening disease, but also life-threatening leadership. This is no small thing.  

We need to see each other. We need to look with ten times the magnification with which we are looking at this tantrum. We need to celebrate each other’s steadfastness and resilience, our neighborliness and creativity. We have shown up for one another in quiet, slow, manatee-like ways for so many months. So many have died—of covid, yes, but also cancer and heart attacks and a thousand other things probably exacerbated by stress and loneliness.

So much has been lost. Beautiful things—like banter with strangers and bellying up to a bar to laugh and cry with a friend. But toxic things, too—so many delusions about this country shed. We are not as far along on our moral arc as we may have thought. We are not as in control, either. Control being, as we are being reminded now, an addiction of wounded, unwise souls.

Sacred is all around us. Sacred is the steadfast sheltering in. Sacred is the children writing barely legible messages to their grandparents about how excited they are to see them when it is safe.

Sacred is the rising bread and the people’s peaceful footfalls during marches that filled these streets this summer. Sacred is the church that shaped MLK delivering a prophetic voice right in time. Sacred is the murmurations and the raging waves and the swaying Redwoods, ancient enough to withstand any man’s silly machinations. Sacred is the stupid zooms and the inside jokes and the living room forts that have gotten us through. Sacred is the soul searching of so many White Americans, the earnest attempts to find different ways of being with others, of being with ourselves. Sacred are the caregivers, who make our country less lonely, the organizers, who make our country more democratic, and the teachers, who aren’t giving up on our kids no matter what. 

This is where my attention is going this week, this month, this year. While they flail, I will focus. While they desecrate, I will nurture. While they grasp for control, I will release—delusions, power, money, whatever will help this place heal. There is a version of this country that exists within and beyond this moment. I’ll meet you there.         

“Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

-Rumi

The Enlightened Heart, p. 59

By what we embrace.

‘Let us be silent so we may hear the whisper of God.’ -Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘There is a voice that doesn’t use words, listen.’ -Rumi

‘God came to my house and asked for charity. And I fell to my knees and cried, ‘Beloved, what may I give?’ Just love, She said. Just love. -St, Francis of Assisi

“We must measure our goodness, not by what we don’t do, what we deny ourselves, what we resist, or whom we exclude. Instead, we should measure ourselves by what we embrace, what we create, and whom we include.’

Chocolat

2000

14.4 Minutes

Mother Lea at Emmanuel Episcopal in Hailey, Idaho reminds us that 1% of a 24 hour day is 14.4 minutes. If we use that time every day to be a ‘lamp, lifeboat, or ladder [Rumi] we will create change.

｡｡·*･｡ ﾟ* 　　　ﾟ *.｡☆｡★　･ 　　 　 *　★ ﾟ･｡ * ｡ 　　　　･　　ﾟ☆ ｡ ｡･ﾟ*.*　★ ﾟ･｡ *·*･｡ ﾟ* 　　 　　　　

‘My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.’

-Rumi

A sun in every person.

‘It is essential to realize and embrace the paradox that while no one can go through your journey for you, you are not alone. Everyone is on the same journey. Everyone shares the same pains, the same confusions, the same fears, which if put out between us, lose their edges and so cut us less.’ -Mark Nepo

‘There’s a sun in every person–the you we call companion.‘ -Rumi

‘Carved by effort and grace.’

Introduction to Walt Whitman’s journal, Specimen Days, by Leslie Jamison:

‘Whitman initially journeyed to the battlefields of the Civil War for personal reasons. After seeing a name he feared was his brother George listed among wartime casualties, in December 1962, he headed to Fredericksburg, where he discovered George had only suffered minor facial lacerations. But this was just the beginning. Whitman started visiting soldiers in hospitals-tens of thousand, all told-and doing what he could: writing letters to families, dressing wounds, bringing treats-rice pudding or blackberry syrup. He once distributed ice cream to all eighteen wards of Carver Hospital.

The goal of a life is to have nothing essential left by the time it leaves its body, the way a flame uses up its wick. This is not sad but as it should be.

-Mark Nepo

♥

Let’s be honest 

which doesn’t mean

being harsh, but gentle.

Let’s be clear

which doesn’t mean being dispassionate, but

holding each other up

in the face of what is true.

Let’s be enduring

which doesn’t mean

being important or famous,

but staying useful like a wheel

worn by rain after years of

carrying each other’s burdens.

-Mark Nepo

♥

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.

-Rumi

Rumi.

‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’

‘How long have we failed to trust?’

A new and beautiful young voice.
❥
‘There are moments in Nature when all the millions of detached details are placed in perfect perspective. It is the cumulative effect of humility and wonder. The sky lights up with phenomenon and for no apparent reason, so does our life. These moments wash over us like the first rains of the season. For how many days, months, years have we missed this feeling of belonging and semblance? For how long have we failed to trust that we are going somewhere beautiful and good? We shake the settled dust out of our muscles and stare into the expanse. We don’t know where we’re going but there are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.’
-Shannon O’Neill Creighton

‘Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.’

-Rumi

You already are love because you are inescapably a part of love itself.

-Science of Mind

Rumi.

I don’t even know if I am or I am not.

When I think I am, I find myself worthless,

when I think I am not, I find my value.

Like my thoughts, I die and rise again each day.  

☆☆¸.•*¨*•☆☆•*¨*•.¸¸☆☆

The eye of the heart…

Maria Papova:

“Citing 13th-century Persian poet and philosopher Rumi‘s famous line — “the eye of the heart, which is seventy-fold and of which these two sensible eyes are only the gleaners” — Schumacher revisits the notion of perceiving with something other than the intellect:

The power of “the Eye of the Heart,” which produces insight, is vastly superior to the power of thought, which produces opinions.

[…]

This is the process of gaining adaequatio, of developing the instrument capable of seeing and thus understanding the truth that does not merely inform the mind but liberates the soul.

[…]

Ideas produce insight and understanding, and the world of ideas lies within us. The truth of ideas cannot be seen by the senses but only by that special instrument sometimes referred to as “the Eye of the Heart,” which, in a mysterious way, has the power of recognizing truth when confronted with it.”

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/08/22/schumacher-adaequatio-understanding/?utm_content=buffere149a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer