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..."