This is not your week to run the Universe.
Next week is not looking so good either.
Susan J. Elliott
Not in charge
Tag: Awareness
A possibility of beauty
What do I do with all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down?
The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is a possibility of beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek?
Annie Dilliard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Everything can wake up
Happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .
Naomi Shihab Nye, So Much Happiness [extract]
New eyes
The storm is over; too bad, I say.
At least storms are clear
about their dangerous intent.
Ordinary days are what I fear,
the sneaky speed
with which noon arrives, the sun shining while a government darkens
a decade or a man falls out of love.
I fear the solace of repetition, a withheld slap in the face.
Stephen Dunn, Ordinary Days
On the way
I am a believer in pilgrimage in a mediaeval sense. It functions to ground us in some way. We have unsettled souls; we are human beings, bound for mortality, wondering about eternity. There is a consolation in doing something that is a ritual – there have been many before us, many will come after us and we are part of something greater than ourselves, if only for a moment.
Liam Ó Muirthile, 1950 – 2018, Irish-language poet
Our interior expectations
We come to realize that the universe mirrors back to us perfectly our beliefs, our intentions, our sincerity. What is is the product of the map of reality you carry inside you?
If you want to change your experience, you need to change the map.
Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine: Ancient Ways to Ultimate Wellness
