The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that’s happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.
Ram Dass
The ongoing news about the pandemic activates the anxious side of our brain and leaves us feeling shaky, imagining worst-case scenarios for the future. These words from Kabir remind us that much of the time we are not grounded in where we actually are.
Be strong then, and enter into your own body; There you have a solid place for your feet. Think about it carefully! Don’t go off somewhere else!
Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things,
And stand firm in that which you are.
Kabir, 15th-century Indian mystic poet
In the Christian tradition the season of Lent begins today, a period of simplification and an opportunity to make space for the deeper realities in our lives, creating room to see what is happening, to go deeper and see where we are being called to invest our energy.
Most people today seems to think that sacrifice means giving something up. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.
Robert Johnson, Jungian Analyst, Balancing Heaven and Earth
The unmoved is the source of all movement.
If you let yourself be blown to and fro,
you lose touch with your root.
If you let restlessness move you,
you lose touch with who you are.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 26
In the midst of the struggle to care for my soul, I read Wordsworth’s poem, ‘The Prelude,’ in which he writes about ‘spots of time’ that nourish and repair the soul. I believe he was referring to brief, concentrated moments- little epiphanies- that inflame us with a sense of the holy. I began to search for spots of time here and there in my day. I found them by stopping. Just stopping. Some of my favorite words that Jesus spoke are, “Come away by yourself to a lonely place and rest a while.” I began to “come away” to a nook somewhere in the house or the yard where I would spend five minutes or less sitting still and receding into the quiet core of myself. Caring for my soul turned out to be simply that – spots of time in which to be.
Sue Monk Kidd, Firstlight: The Early Inspirational Writings
What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots
than reason.
I hope everyone knows that.
Mary Oliver, Such Silence
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