Today

Today

Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

-Mary Oliver, from A Thousand Mornings

Dark Night of the Soul

"You sense in your body and in the fullness of your own emotion a great rupture in the world you have known, an irrevocable emptiness that is not just to be felt but completely absorbed if you are to go on.   A genuine dark night of the soul takes you to this crossroad place, this bardo place, where you have the opportunity, extremely hard won, to live in a different world."  Thomas Moore

Dark Night of the Soul

"Things are not better, but you are in a different state.  Perhaps you are now where the Dark Night has been trying to take you for so long.   Now you are almost ready for a new life, and that is the purpose of bardo.  Slowly, a different kind of light begins to glow from inside you."  Thomas Moore

Bardo

Bardo = a liminal period between the old life and rebirth