angelbirdflies

“There are no shortcuts to wholeness. The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, ‘I am all of the above.’”  Parker Palmer 

Back when I was guru hopping, I went to see yet another visiting, living saint in my hair-on-fire pursuit of... what was I pursuing? I don't even remember. Enlightenment? Freedom from suffering?  Some hoped for supreme good-enoughness. When I arrived the sanctuary was draped in flowers and shrouded in silence.  All the devotees were gnawing on greens and clad in white with a sort of pained, trying-hard-to-be-spiritual expression that looked more like constipation combined with penitent guilt and sadness, overlaid with a thin smile.  In a very short time I realized I needed to leave before I began stripping down to sexy nothingness, swigging whiskey and cursing like a sailor in some existential rant to balance the multitudes. For all the seekers out there, I have a gentle and groundbreaking reminder... there is no spiritual journey... no far shore on which to arrive... T H I S   I S   I T. I know that pisses the mind off. F**k you Angelina! Minds are conditioned to be dissa

“I’m concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood and sisterhood; I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that. And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to humankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate. [...] and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking th

Tell  me, love, what I need right now so that I  might sing, and be alive, as my every cell craves. Tell me, dear, what I need right now, but in a manner I won’t soon forget. Then the world began to sway, its hips invited my arms, its feet placed mine upon them, that made all my effort easy. A father’s toes lifting a child’s in dance caused God to pull out a drum. The Beloved belted out a tune, that went, “Nothing to follow . . . for I will move you. You need not do a damn thing . . . just laugh.” Hafiz, “In a Manner I Won’t Forget,” from  A Year with Hafiz , translation by Daniel Ladinsky

A Gift Of Gratitude  by Brother David Steindl-Rast    You think this is just another day in your  life?  It’s not just another day; it’s the one day that is given to you… today It’s  given  to you. It’s a gift. It’s the only gift that you have right now, and the one appropriate response is gratefulness. If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day of your life, and the very last day, then you will have spent this day  very well. Begin by  opening  your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open, that incredible array of colors that is constantly offered to us for pure enjoyment. Look  at the sky. We so rarely look at the sky. We so rarely note how different it is from  moment to moment  with clouds coming and going. We just think of the weather, and even of the weather we don’t think of all the many nuances of weather. We just think of good weather and bad weather. This da

A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH By Maya Angelou  We, this people, on a small and lonely planet Traveling through casual space Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns To a destination where all signs tell us It is possible and imperative that we learn A brave and startling truth  And when we come to it To the day of peacemaking When we release our fingers From fists of hostility And allow the pure air to cool our palms  When we come to it When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean When battlefields and coliseum No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters Up with the bruised and bloody grass To lie in identical plots in foreign soil  When the rapacious storming of the churches The screaming racket in the temples have ceased When the pennants are waving gaily When the banners of the world tremble Stoutly in the good, clean breeze  When we come to it When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders And children

SINGULARITY by Marie Howe            (after Stephen Hawking) Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money —  nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you.    Remember? There was no    Nature .    No   them .   No tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf    or if  the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French; would that we could wake up   to what we were — when we  were  ocean    and before that  to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all — nothing before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness. Can molecules recall it? what once was?    before anything happened? No I, no We, no one. No was No verb      no noun only a tiny tiny dot brimming with  is is is is is

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies  are not starving someplace, they are starving  somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.  But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.  Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not  be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not  be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women  at the fountain are laughing together between  the suffering they have known and the awfulness  in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody  in the village is very sick. There is laughter  every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,  and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.  If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,  we lessen the importance of their deprivation.  We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,  but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have  the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless  furnace of this world. To make injustice the only  measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. 

“Basho said: avoid adjectives of scale, you will love the world more and desire it less.” - as paraphrased by Robert Hass Just this. Just this is it. Our opinions, judgements and comparisons are unnecessary. Look how far they’ve gotten us. Why not try a different approach? Love what is. And celebrate the simple fact that we don’t really know what’s going on here. That’s the true leap of love. The vulnerability of the unknown, acknowledged and embraced. Love, no longer relegated to mere preference, resumes its natural function in benevolent welcome to what is... as it is.

Earth. Rock. Desert. I am walking barefoot on sandstone, flesh responding to flesh. It is hot, so hot the rock threatens to burn through the calloused soles of my feet. I must quicken my pace, paying attention to where I step. For as far as I can see, the canyon country of southern Utah extends in all directions. No compass can orient me here, only a pledge to love and walk the terrifying distances before me. What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart. I climb the slickrock on all fours, my hands and feet throbbing with the heat. It feels good to sweat, to be engaged, to inhabit my animal body. . . . Once I enter the Joint Trail . . . it is dark, cool, and narrow with sheer sandstone walls on either side of me. . . . The palms of my h

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made sing his being simply by being the thing it is: stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders why God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made, means a storm of peace. Think of the atoms inside the stone. Think of the man who sits alone trying to will himself into a stillness where God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made there is given one shade shaped exactly to the thing itself: under the tree a darker tree; under the man the only man to see God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made the things that bring him near, made the mind that makes him go. A part of what man knows, apart from what man knows, God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made. BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN

Incurable and unbelieving in any truth but the truth of grieving, I saw a tree inside a tree rise kaleidoscopically as if the leaves had livelier ghosts. I pressed my face as close to the pane as I could get to watch that fitful, fluent spirit that seemed a single being undefined or countless beings of one mind  haul its strange cohesion beyond the limits of my vision over the house heavenwards. Of course I knew those leaves were birds. Of course that old tree stood exactly as it had and would (but why should it seem fuller now?) and though a man's mind might endow even a tree with some excess of life to which a man seems witness, that life is not the life of men. And that is where the joy came in BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke. And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider-- lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe-- should be clear: the darkness around us is deep

“Don’t you know yet? It is your light that lights the worlds.” Rumi

N ot Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the east or the west, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is the placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and  that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being.

In 2016 my best friend died of cancer.  I sat at her bedside a few weeks before and said, "Mich, this is not how I thought the story would end."  She pressed my hand, answering, "Neither did I?"  A few weeks later she was gone.  This loss has turned me upside down and inside out.  Not just the loss of my lifelong friend and soulmate-sister but the overwhelming groundlessness accompanying her loss.  Suddenly nothing made sense.  All my belief structures and conceptual models simply collapsed. The only statement I could make with any real conviction was,  "I don't know".  With that there was little left to say.  Little to write.  Little to create. I gave away my loom, my paints, my art boards and supplies.  My well of creativity just ran dry, replaced by an edge of cynicism and apathy.   What would my sister tell me to do? I didn't know.  She was gone.  I couldn't pick up the phone and hear the reassurance of her voice or lean into her