How to Bloom

How amazing that I bumped into this when perusing your perpetual journal today! I was talking about a spiritual experience and conscious contact in the Morning Trip today! The poem How to Bloom describes it well and the flowers a wonderful BAM awake and perfect moment, evidence of noticing and being in the experience.

Rosemary's Blog

I was driving what I hoped would be a shortcut through residential streets to Fremont Avenue (it wasn’t), when I saw these flowers blooming in a parking strip.  I couldn’t recall seeing flowers like this before, so I pulled over to take some photographs.  No sooner had I stepped out of the car, when I was greeted by name!  I was parked in front of the house of one of our Greenwood Library patrons and knitting aficionados.  She told me the flowers were fritillaries.

How to Bloom
by Rainer Maria Rilke

I endlessly marvel at you, blissful ones — at your demeanor,
the way you bear your vanishing adornment with timeless purpose.
Ah, to understand how to bloom: then would the heart be carried
beyond all milder dangers, to be consoled in the great one.

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Morning Trip (358)

“. . . Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine. The interesting thing about these mystics is that, when they describe their experiences, they all end up describing exactly the same occurrence. Generally their union with God occurs in a meditative state, and is delivered thought an energy source that fills the entire body with euphoric, electric light . . .

The most difficult challenge, the saint wrote in her memoirs, was to not stir up the intellect during meditation, for any thoughts of the mind—-even the most fervent prayers—-will extinguish the fire of God. Once the troublesome mind ‘begins to compose speeches and dream up arguments, especially if they are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing important work.’ But if you can surpass those thoughts, Teresa explained, and ascend toward God, ‘it is a glorious bewilderment, a heavenly madness, in which true wisdom is acquired.’ Unknowingly echoing the poems of the Persian Sufi mystic Hafiz . . . .”

—Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love