24 posts tagged “poem”

A picture from within a
very simple picture --
not that simplicity
is always the answer.
It is necessary that some things
grow complicated and various,
although the roots are simple.
Beginnings are within us.
There, they had best be simple
figures in quick      sure      strokes.

from: wood s lot

The Weather Within
Theodore Enslin

In Memory      In Homage
George Oppen
1908-1984

*
The Weather
John Newlove
1938 - 2003
From: Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992

I'd like to live a slower life.
The weather gets in my words
and I want them dry. Line after line
writes itself on my face, not a grace
of age but wrinkled humour. I laugh
more than I should or more
than anyone should. This is good.

But guess again. Everyone leans, each
on each other. This is a life
without an image. But only
because nothing does much more
than just resemble. Do the shamans
do what they say they do, dancing?
This is epistemology.

This is guesswork, this is love,
this is giving up gorgeousness to please you,
you beautiful dead to be. God bless
the weather and the words. Any words. Any weather.
And where or whom. I'd never taken count before.
I wish I had. And then
I did. And here
the weather wrote again.

"[T]he thought pierced him [Sam] that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach."
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

"The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." - Isaiah 11:9

"...as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich, as having nothing, yet possessing everything." - Paul, 2 Corinthians 6:10

"Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!...
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen." – Romans 11:33,36

**

From Faith & Theology

“But what does it mean to take the place of man, to be Himself a man, to be born of a woman? It means for Him, too, God’s Son, God Himself, that He came under the Law …, that He stepped into the heart of the inevitable conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of man. He took this conflict into His own being. He bore it in Himself to the bitter end. He took part in it from both sides. He endured it from both sides. He was not only the God who is offended by man. He was also the man whom God threatens with death, who falls a victim to death in face of God’s judgment. If He really entered into solidarity with us – and that is just what He did do – it meant necessarily that He took upon Himself, in likeness to us, … the ‘flesh of sin’ (Rom 8:3). He shared in the status, constitution and situation of man in which man resists God and cannot stand before Him but must die” (II/1, p. 397)

Like Barth, Torrance stressed that there is no system (no ontology) by which such affirmations can be explained. They are either understood out of themselves or not at all.

-Barth

*

I've done enough.

[my friend Chris]

*

The Art of Disappearing.

When they say Don't I know you? say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say we should get together.
say why? It's not that you don't love them any more.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees.
The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished. When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

*

I sleep, but my heart is awake.

-Song of Songs 5:2

*

At least four different people in the last 24 hours have said to me "I have done enough" -- said by way of a conclusion reached regarding something they did or said that was in some way incongruent with the normal patterns or actions of their lives thus far. It was an announcement that they weren't going to do the thing that they usually do.

I have had this thought as well - a kind of exhaustion of resources, or maybe thinking, "Can't a person get a little bit of help here ?" So that maybe it was a call or cry to the universe for some help, a clue, a tip off, a course correction, a confirmation that all is not in vain. Something. A sign? Can I get a witness ?

Or else it's something childish like, "I just walked away with new free shoes -- and those shoes should have been better."

I have made no preparations for Christmas - no gifts, no anything to speak of and there is no 'because.' I have done enough. In that sense, it seems to me that I have come to the end of that path. That it's time to do things in a different way. It's time for something to move forward, and I can't move it forward. The only way for that to happen is for me to fall back. I hate that. Falling back, I mean, retreating. I want to be large and in charge and move it forward. But it's down to surrender. It's laying down the weapons and disarming.

I dropped a [heavy] can of dog food on my foot last night. Ouch. I hate that when that happens. I tend to take things like that as a sign, then decide that that's stupid. When I discount my own signs and portents its usually that -- my little concerns and disappointments are little, minor, silly and petty compared to the needs and passions of the world. This makes mine a matter of shame and embarrassment and not worth the trouble to look beyond them to that which the signs point. The little and the insignificant IS the season, is it not? It's a sign because it's minor, unimportant and easily passed over. You don't need a voice from the sky to tell you to listen up.

I am no longer expecting the temperature of the room to suddenly lower or there to be wavelike energy emanations announcing an inner truth that is about to be revealed.

"In my heart, I know it was true." God is breaking down old hardness of heart. [maybe] The past-memory-flashes of old failures are perhaps an incipient recognition that I am not that person now, that I might be able to acknowledge and be responsible for what my younger earlier self has done , left undone , done out of stupidity, lack of reflection lack of awareness of childishness.

I have done enough. I have done and now my doing needs to be different.

I taught a yoga class somewhere on Sat that I don't usually teach. As I began the class (not knowing exactly what I was going to do, trying to 'read' the room,) I thought "I've done this for so long now" -- meaning, I guess, that I have come through a lot of digestion of yoga as a means, as a path. I have to teach now out of my own being, not out of a formula or out of how others teach. I have to be the master. I have to own what I know and give it away.

"I have done enough" might be that the desire for more, always more is in conflict with the fact that I do indeed have everything that I need. I have done enough and now a different kind of learning and service might be in store for me. Who knows what enough means in this sense?

*

Last Night As I Was Sleeping

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

Antonio Machado
Translated by Robert Bly

*

From Onehouse

Theology of Surprise.

Oh, I really love this care for the details. And especially because I am not good at the door, nor am I great with surprises. Once again from Insight for Living, Joan Chittister's online commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict:

CHAPTER 66. THE PORTER OF THE MONASTERY

At the door of the monastery, place a sensible person who knows how to take a message and deliver a reply, and whose wisdom keeps them from roaming about. This porter will need a room near the entrance so that visitors will always find someone there to answer them. As soon as anyone knocks, or a poor person calls out the porter will reply, "Thanks be to God" or "Your blessing, please" then, with all the gentleness that comes from reverence of God, provides a prompt answer with the warmth of love. Let the porter be given one of the younger members if help is needed.

Of all the questions to be asked about the nearly 1500 year old Rule of Benedict, and there are many in the twentieth century, one of the most pointed must surely be why one of the great spiritual documents of the Western World would have in it a chapter on how to answer the door. And one of the answers might be that answering the door is one of the arch activities of Benedictine life. The way we answer doors is the way we deal with the world. Benedict wants the porter to be available, "not roaming around" so that the caller is not left waiting; responsible and "able to take a message," so that the community is properly informed; full of welcome; prompt in responding to people "with the warmth of love"; and actually grateful for the presence of the guest. When the person knocks--whenever the person knocks--the porter is to say, "Thanks be to God" or "Your blessing, please," to indicate the gift the guest is to the community. The porter is to be warmth and welcome at all times, not just when it feels convenient. In the Rule of Benedict, there is no such thing as coming out of time to the monastery. Come in the middle of lunch; come in the middle of prayer; come and bother us with your blessings at any time. There is always someone waiting for you.

The chapter on the porter of the monastery is the chapter on how to receive the Christ in the other always. It is Benedict's theology of surprise.

***
Someone once said to me (and a few others), "Be the group that tried."

--Onehouse

**
Little Clown, My Heart
by Sandra Cisneros

Little clown, my heart,
Spangled again and lopsided,
Handstands and Peking pirouettes,
Backflips snapping open like
A carpenter's hinged ruler,

Little gimp-footed hurray,
Paper parasol of pleasures,
Fleshy undertounge of sorrows,
Sweet potato plant of my addictions,

Acapulco cliff-diver corazón,
Fine as an obsidian dagger,
Alley-oop and here we go
Into the froth, my life,
Into the flames!


***
My oldest son has been living in multiple art environments over the last year -- artists, mostly young, banded together for mutual support and craziness, not to mention the sharing and the savings.

The New York Collective, Flux Factory, lost their building to Eminent Domain last month and closed with a *bang* -- a giant party to which the entire city was invited, with well over 60 acts, bands , DJs, call and response DJs (whatever that is).... [Click here for the list of acts, including but not limited to...

~~ Abigail Ohlheiser presents “Come Get Washed in the Blood”, A drag king and a puppet show, Andy Gilliss, Bright Mares, Brooke McGowen’s “Action for Iraq”, Campfire Stories, Carlos Rigau, Cathy, Cave Bears, Caylie Staples, Children of Terminator X, D.A. Meeks, , The Danger presents “In the Wake of the Serpent’s Tattoo”, Ducktails, Flux Factory Fashion Show, F/M presents “Drone to Dance”, The Genderless Siblings from Yellow Bizarre, Greg and Ted’s Satisfaction Factory, Golden Times / Giggle Town, The Hemlock Society, The Heuristic MC, Igor and Tony Have a Spat, Jeremy Chance, Jeremy Williss, Kate Ferencz, Kitlace/The Stink, Konnichiwa, Lady Firefly feat Wolfgang von Stuermer, Lily Maase, Manburger Surgical Presents “The Final Incompetancy”, Mary Ivy Martin’s “Communidate”, Miss Scarlett, No Sound, The NYC Minutes Confessional Booth, The Oracle of Random Quotes, Peter Bonos, Poetix on Da Rox, The Play Party, Rosa Rugosa, The Spirit of a Century (Junk or chains pressure neglects Rogers-in-cranks) GET LOST, SURPRISE!!!, Soul 45’s from Jonathan Toubin of New York Night Train productions, Taliesin, Tarot, Ted Lee, The Mob, Tiger Mouth, Timothy Hospodar and 0H10M1KE present “Omnium-Gathera”, Unicornholio featuring Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria + Marie Losier, Bernard Losier (dad), and Coco (his wife), The Venn Diagrams, White Limo, The Wonderland Collective, Zebu, Zenith Foundation, and Zuvuya Collective presents “Twilight” and “Ladies Room”

There was something going on in each room of a large empty warehouse. I asked, "Like what?" to which he responded that one of the goings on in one of the rooms was "Surprise !" where you would wait in the hall, someone would come and blindfold you and then lead you into a room, and the lights would go on , the blindfold would go off, and everyone in the room would yell, "Surprise !" and then confetti, celebratory words [Happy Birthday! Congratulations!
Bon Voyage! Whatever !] sparklers, cupcakes, jumping up and down, excitement , thrills , chills -- all for one minute, then, you and your cupcake out in the hall while the room was readied for the next participant.

Life is a bit like that, you know. A lot of fuss and then back in the hall and it's someone else's turn. I'm in that seasonal fall place. So many leaves to rake. Whatever.


**

The Sacrament of Waiting

Macrina Wiederkehr

Slowly
she celebrated the sacrament of letting go.
First she surrendered her green,
then the orange, yellow, and red
finally she let go of her brown.
Shedding her last leaf
she stood empty and silent, stripped bare.
Leaning against the winter sky
she began her vigil of trust.

Shedding her last leaf
she watched its journey to the ground.
She stood in silence
wearing the color of emptiness,
her branches wondering;
How do you give shade with so much gone?

And then,
the sacrament of waiting began.
The sunrise and sunset watched with tenderness.
Clothing her with silhouettes
they kept her hope alive.

They helped her understand that
her vulnerability,
her dependence and need,
her emptiness,
her readiness to receive
were giving her a new kind of beauty.
Every morning and every evening they stood in silence
and celebrated together
the sacrament of waiting.

***

Marie Howe  The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

*

The Star Market

The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market

had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them: sour milk, bad meat: looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands and knees begging for mercy.

If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought, I will be healed.
Could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

*
THE WORLD
By Marie Howe

I couldn't tell one song from another,
which bird said what or to whom or for what reason.

The oak tree seemed to be writing something using very few words.
I couldn't decide which door to open -- they looked the same,  or what

would happen when I did reach out and turn a knob.  I thought I was safe,
standing there
but my death remembered its date:

and so many summer nights still stood before me,  full moon,  waning moon,
October mornings:  what to make of them?  which door?

I couldn't tell which stars were which or how far away any one of them was, 
or which were still burning or not -- their light moving through space like a long

late train -- and I've lived on this earth so long -- 50 winters, 50 springs and
summers,
and all this time stars in the sky -- in daylight

when I couldn't see them,  and at night when ,  most nights,  I didn't look.

**

Real Belonging

Sue Monk Kidd

When we find ourselves loved, we begin to lose our sense of alienation. God's love, and the self-love that it breeds within us, restores to us a sense of real belonging in the world. We stop seeing the world as a place of strangers. We begin to find community--one of the most joyous ways of experiencing God. By community I mean a coming together that puts us in touch with ourselves, with others and with God's presence.

One way we can nourish community in our lives is by gathering together with a small group in order to share our spiritual journeys. The promise of God's presence in community is in these words of Jesus, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."

God's Joyful Surprise

**

I’ll turn my face
and keep it fixed on you.

Make this wish come true
in my life.

Just to remain before You,
just to keep my mind raised to You
in all pain, in all desires,
in the midst of every day.

My desires flit about
in many directions
Just make this one desire
come true.

Night after night make this single wish
awaken in me a single pain,
making one day after another
form a garland on a single string,
in a single song of joy.

(Inward Outward)

**

That’s What Love Does

By Richard Rohr

God loves us so perfectly, God lets us be the heroes. God lets us wrestle with the angel of Yahweh, lets us struggle with God and win. When we try to let go and give our life to God, God gives it back to us. Should we be surprised? That’s what love does. That’s the only thing you can get excited about when you’re in love–giving your life to the other and seeing enjoyment in the other. That’s the union toward which God is calling us. The lover delighting in the beloved and the beloved delighting in the lover.

 Job and the Mystery of Suffering

(Inward Outward)

***

GOD SAID YOUR NAME

(via Alive on All Channels)

BY Mark Jarman
from his collection "Epistles"

God said your name today. He said, "Tell me about X." And everybody had a lie you'd like. The solutions for X were all X + 1. X is charming as a firefly, and know a formula for cold fusion. X's good will is equal to the radius of earth; the fall of the meteorite, the passage of the gritty asteroid, the comet's lonely visit: X notes them all. The biological children of X adore their parent almost as much as the many adopted ones, and all of them are making money close to home. X will donate any duplicate organ for a loved one, and X loves everybody: ask for an eye, a kidney, a lung, a lobe of cerebellum.

And so God, boasting to the devil, said, "Consider my servant X."

**

This is from Alive on All Channels,  a post I wrote in November '07

**
Sleeping

Whether you think it's trampy or not,
when we are not awake,
we really are ALL sleeping together.
Sawing logs, snoozing,
getting a little shuteye,
some sacktime,
heading to slumberland,
doing the blanket drill,
the bunk habit,
having a siesta fiesta,
a pajama party
or just getting forty winks
and a good night's rest

We're all setting alarms, reading a bit,
warming our feet and spooning in,
stealing the covers, hogging all the pillows or
taking up the whole bed, grass mat,
hammock or our bit of dry earth.
Whether the satin sheets, fur or flannels
are on the futon, floor or igloo ice
whether we are naked, night gowned
or wearing what we wore all day.
We have been doing this a long time together, alot.

Terrorists and tyrants,
the embargoed, enemies and occupying forces
within a few blocks of each other
lay down everyday
not only their weapons but their bodies,
anger and ideologies.
They give up. They surrender,
not to overwhelming odds or power
but to being...tired.
They know they can't win against it.
Something much bigger says
"I don't want to hear another peep out of you.
Now tuck each other in and go to sleep!"

Daniel Sisco, from A Breath On Stone: New & Selected Poems by Daniel Sisco.
Self-published, 2006

*****

What is it Necessary To Do To Be Saved?

An old man was asked, “What is it necessary to do to be saved?”
He was making rope, and without looking up from the work, he replied, “You are looking at it.”

The deep self-trance is a story we tell about ourselves, built up from bits and pieces of memory, to explain, to ourselves mainly, why we did what we did or react in the way we do, feel as we feel, or think as we think. It’s a story with plots and subplots, characters, heroes, villains, and a host of minor bit parts. It gives us a sense of congruence through life’s changes, an explanation for our thoughts and ideas, a modus operandei, a justification for all that we see we are about. We play different roles at different times in the self-story -- some we play very well, others more or less so-so, and still others rather reluctantly. but it is just a story, and it always begins with “Once upon a time....” -- which is to say, it is a fairy tale.

A coherent story, which includes all the major events and characteristics of our life, is a vital personal asset. The thrust of psychological therapy is to help us tell an accurate tale, not to leave anything out or to alter the fundamental facts, which are grist for the story line. For a good story gives some meaning, purpose, and use to our lives. Informal meditation is a common practice , an admirable human endeavor, an attempt to build a manageable story that we use to explain and justify our daily scenes.

The social environment and culture help, of course, because they are also stories that individuals in a group share among themselves. Society is a shared story built around the same structure and same plots as the self-story, a mirror, albeit a larger one, that reflects our inner theater. Our culture is competitive because our self-world is competitive. There are winners and losers, rewards and penalties, war and peace, ambition, cruelties, cultural biases and prejudices, and untold kindness and compassion. But these qualities are not “out there” in the dog-eat-dog world. They are reflections of the common experience of many individual self-worlds.

If we pay attention with a little bit of honesty, we’ll find the evidence for this playwriting and playacting ability in ourselves. Notice how you talk to yourself, argue, beg, or correct others around you, how you set up the scenes of encounter in your mind when feeling under siege from those more powerful than yourself. Notice the period pieces that you occasionally bring out onto the stage of your memory, how you rehearse scenes, replaying them again and again until you get them “right” to your satisfaction. Be aware of these little dramas and understand them for what they are, a defense against the immediate, unreflected moment, a contraction and a limitation of yourself into a manageable scene.

This storytelling ability, the deep self-trance, gives us the illusion of a separate self, a stage manager in the wings who directs the whole play of our lives. The sense of a separate self is a false sense. It feels real, of course, because we are so entranced by our “feeling” of independence. Our belief that it is real is only an assumption that we haven’t validated by our own experience. But it’s just an impersonation.

And like all imposters, it is very self-conscious about what it does, evaluating, measuring, assessing its performance, taking offense at rejections and criticism, glowing with self-congratulations at compliments and acceptance.

The sense of a separate and enduring self with its dramatics and story lines, this deep self-trance, is the aftermath of the tension between self-image and self-awareness. Self-image is the way we think, feel, sense, and perceive ourselves to be. In some areas we are very clear about ourselves. I like this and not that, I have this history and not another, these personality traits and moods and not other kinds of traits. In other areas we aren’t as clear or as sure about ourselves. Self-image is selective and to some extent fluid, changing to accommodate new experiences and new information. A healthy self-image is always updating itself. A weak or poor self-image tends to be rigid and unbending, dependent on outside support and affirmation.

Self-awareness is different. Whereas self-image has history, self-awareness is a-historical. Self-image is the way I see myself; self-awareness is the way I experience myself in various events of my moment-to-moment existence. When self-image and self-awareness are congruent, I sense a kind of background balance in my life. I’m not uncomfortable with the experiences that come my way, although most people are comfortable with themselves in a limited range of experiences.

Every so often, however, we are caught off guard and surprised by an experience of ourselves that doesn’t fit the picture. The contradiction between experience and image causes tension that can vary from wonderment, to self-doubt, to anxiety, to terror. Managing this tension between what I think and what I want, between my idea of myself and my unruly desires, between my self-bias and my experience, creates the deep self-trance, the sense of a separate and enduring self, the story line of my life. And it’s all driven by fear. The fear of falling apart.

The awareness of how fragile our sense of self is leads to a universal and potentially crippling trait: the temporality of our experiential human life. It is a given of human nature that the conditions of life are subject to change without notice. Thus, we are prone to worry. Change and worry go hand in hand. We try to prepare ourselves for the inevitable, for example, illnesses, transfers, retirement. We also habitually worry about it all, as it it’s important to train ourselves to worry well.

From one perspective we seem to be composed of a bundle of worry-questions, both spoken and unspoken. These worry-questions precede us like a leash dragging us through our day-to-day existence. We are barely aware of them, so routine have they become for us, yet they start when we awaken in the morning. “What am I going to do today?”
“What do I have to do?” “What am I going to wear?” “What shall I have for breakfast?” “What will people think of me if.....?” “Will I be liked?” “Will I be happy?” And so many other worry-questions that set the course of our day, questions that are just beyond the periphery of our awareness, silently steering us through the real and imaginary uncertainties of life.

Our lives are incidental. We hopscotch from incident to incident, event to event, accumulating as we go a bag full of strategies and defenses for our survival, hoping that we will never be caught off guard. We have all taken the Boy Scout motto to heart: Be prepared. But when we examine our personal history, we notice that despite our best efforts, none of us has lived the life we intended. And worrying has not changed that.

Of course, bad things can happen-- unfortunate misunderstandings, unexpected tragedies, and dreaded illnesses. No one is guaranteed a safe life. My life is out of my hands. It is not gong to work out the way I expect or hope it will. All of my knowledge, all of my experience, and all of my planning, do not adequately prepare me to live this moment. and in some fundamental sense I do no live my life. I live an I-don’t -know life. Rather, I am lived, and I am responsible for it.

The worry-questions, these anxieties, are expressions of our egocentricity. Their parent is self-bias, the compulsive need to preserve, at all costs, the comfortable sense we have of ourselves. And how fragile that sense is. Change a routine, we are threatened and respond with anger, pouting, or playing the martyr.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be free of this theater! It does get tedious, taking up so much of our time and energy in posturing and dramatizing and arranging our lives into some mildly satisfactory coherence. It is so tiresome servicing the hidden agenda of the deep self-trance, which gives everyone else their due to keep them at bay, because it expects everyone else to give it its due, independence. That’s the hidden agenda, self-preservation at all cost.

At some point in life almost everyone gets weary of managing the tension that keeps the fiction about the self alive. The story and strategies begin to fail, and people suspect that the meanings that explain their lives, the purposes they’ve dedicated it to and the use they’ve put it to, don’t match up with an elusive sense of life that is beginning to trickle through to consciousness. It is time to go behind the story to the fundamental facts of life just as they are without protective interpretations. The task is quite daunting, for it requires the loss of self, the loss of the sense of a personal history and a hoped-for future, the loss of everything that we’ve built up around ourselves. We are required to lose the self sheathed in its protective trance.

The anonymous desert saying poses a question, but a question that is radically different from the anxious annoyances that glue self-image to self-awareness forming the deep self-trance. It isn’t an easy question to formulate, much less to ask, but it is the fundamental question of life.
No one can help another person in this task, for all individuals must find a meaningful way of asking it for themselves. There is only one question worth asking, one worthy of an answer, one that drives the evolution of consciousness: How do I face life? In the story someone asked an old man, a hermit in the desert, the question this way: “What is it necessary to do to be saved?” Whoever this person was in the story, he or she paid an enormous price to ask this question, which was formulated out of personal experiences, doubts, and humility.

We hope that the right person, the right reputation, the right physical conditions, the right psychological experiences, will result in our contentment. We aren’t looking for genuine happiness. We are looking for its counterfeit, relief and satisfaction. In other words, we believe in the “and-they-lived-happily-ever-after” syndrome. We might laugh at it on the surface, but at a deeper level no one can really convince us that it is just a fairy-tale ending. It takes years of life experience to erode our infantile faith. Again and again, we mistakenly build our hopes on the same optimistic assumptions, only to be disappointed again and again. For happiness is independent of, and prior to, any and all of life’s circumstances and conditions.

Our immediate tendency is to overlook our present experience, in search of an ideal formula for happiness.
We neglect to see in the current conditions and circumstances of our life the happiness we pursue under the camouflage of contentment. As a result, the unavoidable, unexpected, and unwanted fruit of our search is doubt, a doubt that, if allowed to work its magic, will focus a glaring light on our own inadequacy. We live a gray and bland existence peppered periodically with excitement. If we are prepared to learn from our experiences and to bear the burden of doubt, then we will be led to humility. Humility is the simple and keen awareness that we cannot help ourselves in any fundamental way. We cannot make ourselves happy. We cannot make ourselves good. We cannot save ourselves from our foolishness. But we might be able to learn what we
can do.

An uncommon honesty was behind the question this unknown person asked: “What is it necessary to do to
be saved?” It was a question that welled up from the depths of his being like a groan. It drove him to
despair, but it also drove him to the desert.

Just as it is rare to ask this question, so it is rare to have it answered so clearly and compassionately . In
the current religious climate those who are prepared to ask such a personally challenging a question too
often encounter stock religious answers with all the life drained from them. The old man’s response was neither trivial nor flippant. Nor is it as simplistic as it at first sounds. The old hermit had done his work,
which burned away the opaque filter of his self-bias so that he saw vividly and keenly life just as it is. One with the Divine, he was free to find himself and the Divine in whatever happens to be happening. Another anonymous desert saying has it, “God investigates three things in us: mind, word and deed.” This old man had penetrated to the heart of nondual consciousness, had gone past the contradiction between emptiness and mental content appreciating the rightful place of the intellect, and expressed his liberation in the everyday ordinary events and obligations of life. In a later century another anonymous spiritual master would express this liberation for one of his troubled students this way:

Put the strict way on one side and the lax way on the other, and look instead for what is hidden between them; once you have found this you will be free in spirit to pick up or leave any of the other things as you wish...What, you may ask, is this hidden something? Quite simply, it is God...God is hidden between them, and you cannot find him with your intelligence...So choose him, and you will be silently speaking, speaking silence, eating in fasting, fasting in eating, and so forth....This loving choice of God, knowing what to set aside in order to seek him out with the steadfastness of a pure heart, being able to put both opposites aside when they present themselves as the be-all and end-all of spiritual aspiration, is the best way of finding God you can learn in this life.

What is it necessary to do to be saved? The old man “was making rope and without looking up from the work, he replied, ‘You are looking at it.’” It doesn’t sound like a very profound answer. However, the answer fitted the question perfectly. The old man took the measure of the person before him and compassionately revealed the obvious, and the almost obvious, to this young seeker on the verge of liberation from the conflicts and fictions of an independent and separate self.

It is so tempting to set religion apart from the ordinary, making of it a sort of fairyland amusement part.
This is a modern-day rendition of an ancient heresy, Manicheism, which tried to separate reality into spirit and matter, the sacred and the profane. Salvation is healing that illusory split. How do we do that ? We don’t . It is already done. It already always is. The “split” between God and man, the ordinary and the holy, the
sacred and the profane, is a prop in our imaginary self-story. It does not exist and never really did. Our
task is to realize that fact.

Salvation is an everyday ordinary experience. If Christianity really does proclaim good news, then the good news is that everything is redeemed. Nothing is condemned. All that is left to do is to realize it. No condition of life precludes happiness. No condition of life increases it. For a given individual making rope is as holy and effective and expressive as any ritual religious act. The simple act of making rope, or washing dishes, or walking to the office, or talking on the phone, does not imply anything other than itself. Nor is it meant to. Everything is as it should be. Give up the search. It is right here. It is obvious.


(From the remarkable book, Listen To The Desert; Secrets of Spiritual Maturity From the Desert Fathers and Mothers by Gregory Mayers)

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"It is because one antelope will blow the dust from the other's eye that the two antelope walk together"

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"To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you."
--Theophan the Recluse

"From the heart arise unknowable impulses as well as conscious feelings, moods and wishes. The heart, too, has its reasons and is the center of perception and understanding. Finally, the heart is the seat of the will: it makes plans and comes to good decisions. Thus the heart is the central and unifying organ of our personal life. Our heart determines our personality and is therefore not only the place where God dwells but also the place to which Satan directs his fiercest attacks. It is this heart that is the place of prayer. The prayer of the heart is a prayer that directs itself to God from the center of the person and thus affects the whole of our humanness."
--Henri Nouwen "The Way of The Heart"

**
"Love and rationality, therefore, rather than being enemies of each other, must be all of a piece. Reasoning about another person, about God, and about ourselves is only reliable when it is grounded in love. Moreover, really loving depends upon our ability to see and know another person, God, and even ourselves as more than an extension of our own needs, desires, or fantasies."
--Roberta Bondi "To Pray and To Love"

**

Here is a video from a coaching session with Byron Katie, author of Loving What Is and creator of The Work. Here is a powerful example of how she coaches someone through her fear of generalized anxiety in the future (click on link to view video if you can't see YouTube screen on this blog): I fear suffering in the future.









My biggest takeaway: "This moment is all there is. It is all there ever will be."

www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/.../spirit.jpg

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from "Contemplative Listening"

Emily Dickinson:

"They might not need me—yet they might—

I’ll let my heart remain in sight—

A skill so small as mine might be

Precisely their necessity—"

The practice for all group members: Without stepping out of the practice for the listener-responder, a group setting requires the additional task of following the exchanges between the teller and other members of the group and moving with them to the next present moment. The conversation is not static, not simply each one in turn responding as an individual to what they heard in the story—the conversation moves and grows in the group. That means listening to what is now the reality, and responding to that reality, both its content and feeling tone. As in the pastor’s office, one listens within a dynamic reality of an unfolding story, one that is being created in this very moment of speaking, listening, responding, hearing.

Returning to the Dickinson poem: “I’ll let my heart remain in sight...” You, present. You, your heart “remains in sight.” Not intruding, taking over from the speaker, interpreting the speaker’s experience to him/her, just “remaining in sight” as a companion who hears, attends, waits, while God works directly in the teller. Like a sounding board amplifies a musical tone, so contemplative listening magnifies the teller’s experience so that he or she can “hear” it more fully, more deeply. Contemplative listening “hears another into speech.” as Nel Morton has so aptly put it.

As we tell stories in a group setting, the group members’ responses create a collage, each person polishing a small facet of the teller’s experience and giving it back to the teller. A few minutes of this kind of rich exchange can bring out whole new understandings in the teller. It’s not uncommon to hear: “I never made that connection before—it’s really true.” The most subtle and amazing thing happens as we tell stories to each other and try to respond contemplatively for a period of time.  Communities are formed! Communities of shared life, communities of trust, communities of tears and laughter. People are affirmed. Do you know how rare it is to be really heard? What a precious gift, one that the receiver so often experiences as grace. . .

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Contemporary Jesuit Willi Lambert has tried to summarize the essential operations of the Ignatian style of conversation:

1. Be convinced of the surprising worth of conversation, and thus of the importance of preparing oneself while recognizing that a really successful conversation is a gift.

2. Speak slowly, carefully and affectionately.

3. Listen with peaceful attention to the whole person.

4. Come to conversations free of prejudice

5. Rarely, if ever use arguments from authority to trump the other speaker.

6. Speak with modest lucidity.

7. Take enough time.

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From blog "The Corner"

For me, spirituality is about connection and conversation. That is, becoming spiritual is about becoming connected to my Self, to others and ultimately, to Allah. It is also about conversation, or dialogue if you will, because in becoming connected it is necessary to communicate. For me, connection is a positive metaphor because it suggests a freely chosen association. It also suggests a deeper, inward meeting; when two hearts connect, the distance between them falls away and they stand as one.

Connection begins and ends in communication. The soul at rest (nafs al-mutma’inna) is able to converse, in the imaginal realm, with Allah. For those of us still on the open road, we need to converse to understand. I talk to my Self, to others and to God - to puzzle out this riddle of me, this strange thing called life. Conversation and connection therefore are really just another way of saying suhba (or sohbet) - ‘companionship’. Thus, I am being ’spiritual’ when I am honestly striving to connect, to communicate.

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"Spiritual Conversation, or Sohbet, is the heart of group practice. It is the connecting point of all the other activities: individual practice, group remembrance, music, study, social life, ethics. It is the primary relationship with the shaikh and the context n which people come to know one another. It is the activity that connects and makes sense of all others.

Sohbet is not sermon or lecture, but discourse, storytelling, encounter, and spiritual courtship. It is how God's lovers share and intensify their love."

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In order to realize the potential of true sohbet, it is necessary to maintain an active listening and keep oneself out of the way in order to learn to attend. Without the proper quality of attention, it would be easy to drift off. Sohbet helps to develop a sustained attentiveness in the processing of ideas. Something vast opens up and connections begin to be made; one can absorb a lot of essential material. Sometimes we have to work to contain our enthusiasm to monopolize the group's attention We learn to weigh what really is important.

The way this is most often accomplished involves a clear understanding within the group that we have not come together for an exchange of opinions. It is necessary, first of all, to begin in a state of presence, usually after some preparatory inner work: meditation, inner exercises, and the like.

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The way to God passes through servanthood. The point is to love and be connected with others in that love. The form of Sufi work is typacally a group, or spiritual guild. The Sufis created a milieu in which human love was so strong that it naturally elevated itself to the level of cosmic love. All forms of love eventually lead to spiritual love. " 'Ashq aosun'," they say in Turkish: "May it become love." The Sufis cultivated a kindness and refinement in which love fermented into a fine wine. They encouraged service to humanity as an expression of the love they felt. They accepted a rigorous discipline in order to keep the fire of love burning strongly.

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from

"A Knowing Heart --
A Sufi path of Transformation"

Kabir Helminski

Posted by beth (cross posted to Alive on All Channels)