Loss and Grief

"The reality is that you will grieve forever.  You will not get over the loss of a loved one.  You will learn to live with it.  You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered.  You will be whole again but you will never be the same.  Nor should you be the same.  Nor would you want to.  Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Life.....

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
~ Louise Erdrich

Dark Times

"Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am."
Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Rilke

Trans-formation

Living long enough we all find ourselves surrounded by an old way of thinking, being or loving that is going up in flames.    In that unexpected moment, we usually find ourselves full of fear, feeling trapped by an old way of life coming in on us.  But this is the passage of rebirth that we must move through if our lives are to unfold.  It is the momentary and painful crossing from what is old into what is new.  We must trust that the greater sea we are jumping into will douse whatever catches fire as we move through.   This is what faith is all about.   Mark Nepo

Hurt

"The worm is one of the only creatures that grows from bing cut.  Mysteriously, if you cut a worm in two, each half becomes whole, and you have two worms.

What is it in how the worm lives that allows it to grow from its pain, and how might we translate that to being human  It lives in humus -the soil- inside and out. 

Perhaps the secret to growing from our wounds is to live close to the earth, to live with our hearts and minds and bellies always in touch -both inside and out - with that which is larger than we are. 

Perhaps, when cut in two, it is a life of humility, of risking to be at one with the soil of our experience, that allows us to heal into something entirely new."  Mark Nepo

Mother Wisdom Speaks

Mother Wisdom Speaks

Some of you I will hollow out.
I will make you a cave.
I will make you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness.
You will be a bowl.
You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain.

I will hollow you with knives.
I will not do this to make you clean.
I will not do this to make you pure.
You are clean already.
You are pure already.

I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you.
I will do this for the space that you will be.
I will do this because you must be large.
A passage.
People will find their way through you. A bowl.
People will eat from you and their hunger will not weaken them unto death.
A cup to catch the sacred rain.

My daughter, do not cry. Do not be afraid.
Nothing you need will be lost.
I am shaping you.
I am making you ready.

Light will flow in your hollowing.
You will be filled with light.
Your bone will shine.

The round, open center of you will be radiant.
I will call you Brilliant One.
I will call you Daughter who is wide.
I will call you Transformed.
By Christine Lore Webber ©

The Warrior's Way

"A self-sacrificing way,
but also a warrior's way, and not
for brittle people, easily broken, glass bottle people.
The soul's tested here by sheer terror,
as a sieve sifts and separates
genuine from fake.
And this road is full of footprints!
Companions have come before.
They are your ladder
Use them!
Without them you won't have the spirit-quickness
you need.  Even a dumb donkey
crossing a desert
becomes nimble-footed
with others of its kind.
Stay with the caravan.  By yourself,
you'll get a hundred times more tired,
and fall behind."  

Rumi

Fearlessness

"A fearless sort of living allows us to delight in the koan of human existence.   We stop fearing the opposite of happiness, or the opposite of success, or the opposite of love, because we no longer believe in opposites.  Unity within duality reduces the sense of drama and tragedy in daily life."  Elizabeth Lesser

Feeling

"Feeling is life and death at the same time."  Hazrat Inayat Khan

Contradiction

"When we discover the supreme happiness of unity within ourselves we reconcile what once seemed irreconcilable.  Opposites become partners.   Our longing for stability in a constantly changing world becomes humorous.  Our desires for connection and our troubles with intimacy become grist for the spiritual mill.  We allow diversity to flourish within the context of unity.   We understand that the unadulterated, pure, singleness of feeling we long for can be experienced only when we allow all feelings to live in peace within our hearts."  Elizabeth Lesser

Discovery

"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.   Andre' Gide

Perspective

‎"Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but
to add color to my sunset sky." ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Dark Night of the Soul

"There is a smith in our soul who works the failures and successes of everyday life int eternal shapes that make us who we are.  It is not extraordinary, this dark place of heat and hammering, but rather an unspectacular scene of hard work.   You might think of your dark night as such a place and realize the importance of keeping it stoked and fired and dim.  Your job is to provide the setting and let the divine smith do his work."    Thomas Moore

Perspective

"It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all." - Emmet Fox

Perspective

Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Living Life to the Full

“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.” ~ Paulo Coelho

Inspiration

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rilke
Book of Hours, I 59

Dark Night of the Soul

"The dark night itself is a kind of vessel that allows our putrefaction, the breaking apart of a life that once made sense but needed reviving."  Thomas Moore

Dark Night of the Soul

"Your dark night is liminal, an in-between place, and that explains in part why it is so uncomfortable.   It is neither here nor there.   It seems to take you out of life rather than further into it.   It becomes difficult to find words to describe your experience, and you may hesitate to describe it to friends because people usually want good news.   They don't know what's going on.   Nobody around knows what is happening to you.   But something is taking place, some deep process dissolving you and remaking you into something new."   Thomas Moore

Wholeness

"Most of us are dragged
toward wholeness
We do not understand
the breakdown of what has gone before.
We do not understand.
We cling to the familiar,
refuse to give up our habitual lives,
resist our growth.
We do not understand rebirth
do not accept the initiation rites.
Most of us are dragged toward wholeness."