Taking A Leap

"The on-the-spot practice of being fully present, feeling your heart, and greeting the next moment with an open mind can be done at any time: when you wake up in the morning, before a difficult conversation, whenever fear or discomfort arises. This practice is a beautiful way to claim your warriorship, your spiritual warriorship. In other words, it is a way to claim your courage, your kindness, your strength. Whenever it occurs to you, you can pause briefly, touch in with how you're feeling both physically and mentally, and then connect with your heart-even putting your hand on your heart, if you want to. This is a way of extending warmth and acceptance to whatever is going on for you right now. You might have an aching back, an upset stomach, panic, rage, impatience, calmness, joy-whatever it is, you can let it be there just as it is, without labeling it good or bad, without telling yourself you should or shouldn't be feeling that way. Having connected with what is, with love and acceptance, you can go forward with curiosity and courage. I call this step "taking a leap."

-   Pema Chodron in, "Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change"

Religion

12 Symptoms

Everyone

Longing

LONGING has its own secret future destination, and its own seasonal emergence from within, a ripening from the core, a seed growing in our own bodies; it is as if we are put into relationship with an enormous distance inside us leading back to some unknown origin and with its own secret timing, indifferent to our wills, and at the same time, outwardly, an intimate sense of proximity, to a lover, to a future, to a transformation, to a life we want for ourselves; to the beauty of the sky and the need for a new ground beneath it. Longing is nothing without its dangerous edge, that cuts and wounds us while setting us free and beckons us exactly because of the human need to invite the right kind of peril; The foundational instinct is that we are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world; that we are a form of invitation to others and to otherness, that we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work or for a gift given against all the odds. In longing we move and are moving from a known but abstracted elsewhere, to a beautiful, about to be reached, someone, something or somewhere we want to call our own. © David Whyte: from Readers' Circle Essay, "Longing" 2011

Photo © DW 2014 : Paris: Winter Sky.

Don't give up

Why Music

Art

Freedom

Fate

First Love

Hear Her Breathing

The future is Ours

Something you are …

"The human brain is a highly differentiated form through which consciousness enters this dimension. It contains approximately one hundred billion nerve cells (called neurons), about the same number as there are stars in our galaxy, which could be seen as a macrocosmic brain. The brain does not create consciousness, but consciousness creates the brain, the most complex physical form on earth, for its expression. When the brain gets damaged, it does not mean that you lose consciousness. It means consciousness can no longer use that form to enter this dimension. You cannot lose consciousness because it is, in essence, who you are. You can only lose something you have, but you cannot lose something that you are."  Eckhart Tolle

Dignity

In the end …

Hózhó -

Hózhó - 

The Navajo believe the world to be an orderly place filled with interconnected objects all existing in a state of balance and harmony. The bedrock of the Navajo religion is the concept of Hózhó, which means a combination of existing in a state of balance, harmony, wellness, peace, and completeness. A sort of integrated oneness, with the universe running like an incredibly finely adjusted watch, with everything seamlessly working together. It is a complex concept that is remarkably similar to the Chinese Tao. The simplified translation of "to walk in beauty" trivializes the complexity of Hózhó. For the Navajo, Hózhó is everything, and when it goes awry, the orderly universe is disrupted and must be restored to its natural order. The issue is not one of aesthetics

Plant A Tree

Inner Shadows

Taught To Hate

Patient perseverance

"If we would create the capacities for understanding our future, then we must dwell in the tensions, the paradoxes, the annoying anomalies of our time. We dare not minimize, avoid, cover over, or anesthetize ourselves. On nearly every front we are being called on to re-imagine the world we inhabit. It simply awaits an act of courage for us to begin, and patient perseverance for us to succeed in the self-conscious education now in our hands."- Arthur Zajonc, physicist

Made for goodness

 "You and I are made for goodness. You and I are creatures who are made for transcendence, were made for love, were made for caring, were made for embracing one another. I have look out of door but I mean, although God looks down and sees all of the ghastly things and God says oh, dear. Whatever got into me to create that lot?  And then God sees and God sees the others, the ones who wipe the tears from the eyes of the many, the ones that say we want to do something about poverty eradication. We want to do something about the HIV pandemic and God begins to smile through the tears. And a little angel walks up to God and wipes God's tears from God's eyes. And God says, yes, they have vindicated me. Because you and I are ultimately made for goodness. And that is what is going to prevail."-- Archbishop Desmond Tutu at Clinton Global Initiative

Fragmentary thought

"At present, people create barriers between each other by their fragmentary thought. Each one operates separately. When these barriers have dissolved, then there arises one mind, where they are all one unit, but each person also retains his or her own individual awareness. That one mind will still exist even when they separate, and when they come together, it will be as if they hadn't separated. It's actually a single intelligence that works with people who are moving in relationship with one another. . . . If you had a number of people who really pulled together and worked together in this way, it would be remarkable. They would stand out so much that everyone would know they were different."  ~David Bohm (physicist, philosopher, & mystic)

Why they're really here

Every cell in the body is programmed to work collaboratively with every other cell, so together they can promote the healthy functioning of the organ they're part of. You and I are the same; we're programmed to work collaboratively with each other in order to promote the healthy functioning of civilization. But just as a cancer cell is a cell that goes insane, disconnecting from its natural programming and going off to do its own thing instead, so a malignant consciousness has come to dominate the human race, luring us into self-centered and competitive rather than collaborative attitudes toward each other. The body can heal though, and so can a civilization. Cells, and people, can remember who they really are and why they're really here. Then all is well. Marianne Williamson

Trees

The Man Who Lives Without Money

Stroke of luck

Seven whispers

"The Seven Whispers:

- Maintain peace of mind.

- Move at the pace of guidance.

- Practice certainty of purpose.

- Surrender to surprises.

- Ask for what you need and offer what you can.

- Love the folks in front of you.

- Return to the world."

- Christina Baldwin, from her beautiful little book,  "The Seven Whispers"