believe it

"I used to think you needed to see it, to believe it. But now I realize that to see it, you must first believe it. Everything is possible. Everything is possible."

Andre Jordan

feeling the earth in us

"If there can be such a thing as instinctual memory, the consciousness of land and water must lie deeper in the core of us than any knowledge of our fellow beings. We were bred of the earth before we were born of our mothers. Once born, we can live without our mothers or our fathers or any other kin or friend, or even human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in man’s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men."

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

imagine

We lay there & looked up at the night sky & she told me about stars called blue squares & red swirls & I told her I'd never heard of them. Of course not, she said, the really important stuff they never tell you. You have to imagine it on your own.

(from storypeople.)

on planning

we must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

joseph campbell

love in spite of it all

Before this odyssey ever began there was you, your best friends, and wide-eyed curiosity among you about who would be the first to leap, the first to forget, the first to kiss, the first to tell, the first to fall, the first to get back up, and the first to remember that it all began with a dare: to love in spite of it all.

waking up early these days..

..and loving it.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.
—Rumi

be joyful that you are a warrior of love

"Aren't we privileged to live in a time when everything is at stake, and when our efforts make a difference in the eternal contest between the forces of light and shadow, between togetherness and division, between justice and exploitation? Oh, be joyful that you are a warrior in this great time!

"Will we rise to this battle? If so, we cannot lose, for rising up to it is our victory . . . If we represent love in the world, you see, we have already won."

- Doris "Granny D" Haddock from her 93rd birthday speech

another year of living

so grateful this year on my birthday... a life full of amazing people, love, possibility. and how lucky am i to share it with such an inspiring sister?

july means good horoscopes!

CANCER (June 21-July 22): I believe that when you chatter carelessly about a big change that's in the works, you're in danger of draining it of some of its potency. So I don't want to trumpet or gossip about the gift that's on its way to you. I'll just mention that it's coming, and urge you to prepare a clean, well-lit place for it to land. Here's a hint: It could, among other things, help you convert one of your vulnerabilities into a strength or inspire you to start transforming an area of ignorance into a future source of brilliance.

yoga is

Yoga is a harmony. Not for him who eats too much, or for him who eats too little; not for him who sleeps too little, or for him who sleeps too much. A harmony in eating and resting, in sleeping and keeping awake: a perfection in whatever one does. This is the Yoga that gives peace from all pain. — The Bhagavad Gita, trans, Juan Mascaro

to meditate

To meditate is not to empty the mind and gape at things in a trancelike stupor. Nothing significant will ever be revealed by just staring blankly at an object long and hard enough. To meditate is to probe with intense sensitivity each glimmer of color, each cadence of sound, each touch of another’s hand, each fumbling word that tries to utter what cannot be said.

–Stephen Batchelor

step into a circle...

Step out onto the Planet. Draw a circle a hundred feet round. Inside the circle are 300 things nobody understands, and, maybe nobody’s ever really seen. How many can you find? — Lew Welch, Ring of Bone

nature.

How is it — I said to myself, that I can possibly have lived so long outside nature, without identifying myself with her? All things live, all things have motion, all things correspond. The majestic rays emanating from myself to others, traverse without obstacle, the infinite chain of created things. — Marsden Hartley

values

I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. — Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold

change.

toes brushing a sky
blue to grey blue to grey
heavy with water and cities and sleeping birds

we walk slower
umbrellas neatly packed
eyes up
humming breathing palms sweating

to dodge the drops
the growing dancing drops
mixed with feathers and skyscrapers and dreams

heart opens closes
beats and drums and twists
fists to palms to fists
blinking and staring and darkness

opening and closing
all waiting to catch slivers of a sky
heavy with water and cities and sleeping birds

breathing in and out

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.

- Rumi

fearing our power

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson

faith

Faith is not being sure. It is not being sure, but betting with your last cent... Faith is not a series of gilt-edged propositions that you sit down to figure out, and if you follow all the logic and accept all the conclusions, then you have it. It is crumpling and throwing away everything, proposition by proposition, until nothing is left, and then writing a new proposition, your very own, to throw in the teeth of despair... Faith is not making religious-sounding noises in the daytime. It is asking your inmost self questions at night and then getting up and going to work... Faith is thinking thoughts and singing songs and making poems in the lap of death.

Mary Jean Irion, 1970
from "Yes, World: A Mosaic of Meditation"

dancing love

A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back -- it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

spiritual apes?

I loved this clip from Jane Goodall I came across today about the spirituality she senses present in apes...


"Sometimes as a chimpanzee—most often an adult male—approaches a spectacular waterfall deep in the forest, his hair bristles, a sign of heightened arousal. As he gets closer, and the roar of falling water gets louder, his pace quickens, and upon reaching the stream he performs a magnificent display that can last more than ten minutes. Standing upright he sways rhythmically from foot to foot, stamping in the shallow water, picking up and hurling rocks, climbing the vines that hang down from high above and swinging out into the spray of falling water. Chimps also dance at the onset of a very heavy rain....

After a waterfall display the performer may sit on a rock, his eyes following the falling water. What is this water, always coming, always going- yet always there? What causes the great claps of thunder, the torrential downpour, the savage gusts of wind? Is it not possible that these (chimp dance and meditation) performances are stimulated by feelings akin to wonder and awe?" asks Goodall. "And if the chimpanzees could discuss these feelings among themselves, might not this lead to an animistic worship of the elements?

... Day after day in the wilderness, I became ever more attuned to the great Spiritual Power that I felt around me—the Power that is worshiped as God, Allah, Tao, Brahma, the Great Spirit, the Creator and so on."

I came to believe that all living things possess a spark of that Spiritual Power. We humans call that spark, in ourselves, a 'soul.' And if this is so it is surely true for other animals..."

after a two month attempt at having cable after never having a tv before in my adult life, we've decided to kill it. i'm feeling okay to have all the reality shows and oprah out of my system (oh man will i miss oprah). i wanted more time for creating, journaling, writing, oming.... the quote below spoke to the feelings pretty perfectly."Most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.

This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

live the questions

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

i ching- hexagram 49

No revolution in outer things is possible without prior revolution in one's inner way of being. Whatever change you aspire to in your affairs must be preceded by a change in heart, an active deepening and strengthening of your resolve to meet every event with equanimity, detachment, and innocent goodwill. When this spiritual poise is achieved within, magnificent things are possible without.

Hexagram 49-KO

the sun...

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe Me."

Look what happens
with a love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky.

~Hafiz
The Gift

what a genius

A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty.

-Einstein

nothing is what we thought

“The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought. That’s what we’re going to discover again and again. Nothing is what we thought.” -Pema Chodron

rumi's guesthouse.

This being human is a guesthouse.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

christmas on friday the 13th.

girl scout cookies are about to get delivered. mmmmm.

inspired.

Feeling like going home to write... and write... and write...

Here's one by Hafiz, the man...


One day the sun admitted,

I am just a shadow.
I wish I could show you
The Infinite Incandescence

That has cast my brilliant image!
I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in the darkness,

The Astonishing Light
Of your own Being!

mary oliver mmm.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Mary Oliver

new life goal?

to go to TED... here's another talk for today. isabel allende is ah-mazzzinngg. maybe i need to write my first book soon?

creative juices.

i love this woman... check this out if you are always creating or dreaming about a million art projects you never get to. she will for sure inspire!

homework

Push hard to get better, become smarter, grow your devotion to the truth, fuel your commitment to beauty, refine your emotional intelligence, hone your dreams, negotiate with your shadow, cure your ignorance, shed your pettiness, heighten your drive to look for the best in people, and soften your heart—even as you always accept yourself for exactly who you are with all of your so-called imperfections.

-Rob Brezsny

little house

i want to live in a compact house in the woods one day.

spring sunset

loving a spring sunset to the tune of birds chirping... 70 degree breeze drifting through the open windows.

blooming

warm weather = spring. can't wait.

mindfulness mindfulness

this nytimes article definitely reminds me of when i was swimming in yoga school practicing.

writer's block

i need to do some headstands to get my poetry flowing again.

my dog is a buddha

see him dreaming of love?

guru writes to kfc

thich naht hanh brings light everywhere, even to kfc.