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 (255)

“The problem is that the self that you became convinced was the real you is a phantom that exists only as an abstraction in your mind – animated by the conflicted emotional energy of separation. It’s about as real as last night’s dream. And when you stop thinking it into existence, it has no existence at all. That’s why it is false – which begs the question, who or what is the real you?

At the core of the false self is a void of deficiency derived from an essential turning away from one’s own divinity, either out of natural development, despair, or simply by succumbing to the trance of the world with all its masks of deception and harsh obligation to conform to its insanity. The false self orbits around this vacuous abyss at its core, in silent terror of its nameless, faceless threat of oblivion.

The false self is both an obstacle and a doorway through which you must pass on your way to awakening to the dimension of being. As you pass through the void of self, the identification with self dies, either temporarily or permanently, and you are revealed (reborn) to be a presence. Presence is not a self in any conventional sense. It has no shape or form, no age or gender. It is an expression of universal being, the formless substance of existence. Presence is not subject to birth or death; it is not of the world of “things.” It is the light and radiance of consciousness in which entire worlds arise and pass away.”
–Adyashanti, wait – what?

Morning Trip (60)

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
— Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays)

An Elder with an Empty Mind

“Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step.”
– Agnes Martin

And then…the Creator has other plans!–Purple Profundity: Poetry by Elisabeth Connelley

One drop of rains falls.
It can be ignored.
More gently patter down.
I look up (do you?).
A teasing pause.
One drop, two, a rush, a dance
The mind moves, the body follows.
A weaving dance, feeling joy, creating downpours of expression,
rising, twisting, and spinning
across a pattern of life
simple joy.
I smile, inside and out (do you?).
Come to ground.
Refreshed by self after converting gift of rain.
I sit, peacefully (do you?).
I watch the gift of ground.

–elisabeth connelley

Morning Trip (24)

I see my beauty in you. I become
a mirror that cannot close its eyes

to your longing. My eyes wet with
yours in the early light. My mind

every moment giving birth, always
conceiving, always in the ninth

month, always the come-point. How
do I stand this? We become these

words we say, a wailing sound moving
out into the air. These thousands of

worlds that rise from nowhere, how
does your face contain them? I’m

a fly in your honey, then closer, a
moth caught in flame’s allure, then

empty sky stretched out in homage.
– Jelaluddin Rumi
The Glance Songs of Soul-Meeting

Morning Trip (15)

“One of the most difficult things to learn is that mindfulness is not dependent on any emotional or mental state. We have certain images of meditation. Meditation is something done in quiet caves by tranquil people who move slowly. Those are training conditions. They are set up to foster concentration and to learn the skill of mindfulness. Once you have learned that skill, however, you can dispense with the training restrictions, and you should. You don’t need to move at a snail’s pace to be mindful. You don’t even need to be calm. You can be mindful while solving problems in intensive calculus. You can be mindful in the middle of a football scrimmage. You can even be mindful in the midst of a raging fury.”
Mindfulness Versus Concentration
– Henepola Gunaratana
Mindfulness in Plain English
and/or
Mindfulness in Plain English

Morning Trip (11)

“For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.”
– Milan Kundera

This one is most excellenty! I am so pleased at the vast resources for information available online that provide pokes and prods, kisses and caresses for mind, body, and spirit!