Morning Trip (372)

”There is a serene and settled majesty to woodland scenery that enters into the soul and delights and elevates it.”
—-Washington Irving

All Out of Still — Orphan Wisdom

A few months ago a certain degree of unspectacular life adversity leaned over to me and whispered: “What if you stop for a while? You were obliged off the road anyhow by the plague. Why not go the rest of the way there, and choose stillness?” Clever fellow. Years ago I remember coming across some stout…

All Out of Still — Orphan Wisdom

GOSH! I am SO grateful for the above post from Stephen Jenkinson. It put words to all the things, and in them, I became still. The still, for me can then leave room for creation. Of what!? My built in forgetter thinks it gets to control that outcome. Sometimes I believe my actions are proof that I can. The part feeling so proud and SEE yes I did! and Control is GOOD! Is all perked in the I Have Arrived pose. And then, the muscles start to quake and to shiver. The pose doesn’t hold up for long. It collapses in exhaustion long before my thinking, my mind even begins to notice. While I write it, I’m smiling like an indulgent parent watching a toddle learn… But IN it, oh I believe it’s Hell! I’m prone to grab, and to shove, and to rant. Thank you, Sir, for the Spring in my step. For now.

Morning Trip (362)

“A good practitioner is not someone who no longer has any anger or suffering. This is not possible. A good practitioner is someone who knows how to take good care of her anger and suffering as soon as they arise. Someone who does not practice does not know how to handle the energy of anger when it manifests, and he or she can easily be overwhelmed by anger.”
—-Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger Wisdom for Cooling the Flames

Morning Trip (359)

“May you hold space in your day
For the holy,
For the sacred,
For settling into center,
For coming home to wholeness,
For watching the world spin.”
—-Molly Remer, Brigid’s Grove—Patreon

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

Morning Trip (348)

“The soil of any one place makes its own peculiar and inevitable sense. It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long without seeing it as analogous to the life of the spirit.”

—-Wendell Berry

Morning Trip (345)

“Meditation is not just blindly following whatever the person next to you does. To meditate you have to be skillful and make good use of your intelligence.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger, Wisdom for Cooling the Flames

Morning Trip (341)

”Magic is a discipline of the mind, and it begins with understanding how consciousness is shaped and how our view of reality is constructed. Since the time of the Witch persecutions, knowledge that derives from the worldview of an animate, interconnected, dynamic universe is considered suspect—-either outright evil or simply woo-woo.

But whenever an area of knowledge is considered suspect, our minds are constricted. The Universe is too big, too complex, too ever-changing for us to know it completely, so we choose to view it through a certain frame—-one that screens out pieces of information that conflict with the categories in our minds. The narrower that frame, the more we screen out, the less we are capable of understanding or doing.”
—-Starhawk, author of The Spiral Dance