My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.
When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.
“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—
otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.“
Naomi Shihab Nye, The Words Under the Words
I love you, gentlest of Ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.
you, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,
you, the song we sang in every silence,
you dark net threading through us,
on the day you made us you created yourself,
and we grew sturdy in your sunlight…
let your hand rest on the rim of heaven now and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, translation anita barrows and joanna macy
Many of us have been convinced – by our society, by our own experiences in life, and by our own logic, that we cannot trust our own natural state of being. We turn away from ourselves and our experiences. In mindfulness practice we are learning not to destroy or control our feelings, but to discover them and be present with them. We begin to see how they work when we enter fully into them and give them room. We begin to see how we create our emotional lives and reactions. In this process, we learn to trust awareness and direct presence more and more deeply. As we explore the layers of our fear, our trust expands into wider and wider circles of who we are. The process of awakening can be understood as ever-widening circles of trust. …… Fearlessness is not necessarily the absence of fear. It is a positive quality that can exist side by side with fear, overcoming the limitations arising out of fear.
Gil Fronsdal, The Issue at hand
I spent yesterday morning in the lovely retreat house at the Tearmann Spirituality Center in Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, with the MBSR group I am currently working with. A quiet morning of sitting meditation and walking, and space in the wide expanses of the mountains and the forest. We tend to get consumed by the activities we do, the words we say, the thoughts we think, and the things we have. Our minds get drawn there, and not to the spaces before and after that hold them. What if the gaps were more important? What if we practiced focusing more on the spaces around moments, nurturing them and making wider the gaps within and without? These are the home of the spirit. They nourish us, widening the heart and giving life.
Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — universe.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
photo, Glendalough, pixie from he
Settle down in your room at a moment when you have nothing else to do. Say “I am now with myself,” and just sit with yourself. After an amazingly short time you will most likely feel bored. This teaches us one very useful thing. It gives us insight into the fact that if after ten minutes of being alone with ourselves we feel like that, it is no wonder that others should feel equally bored! Why is this so? It is so because we have so little to offer to our own selves as food for thought, for emotion and for life. If you watch your life carefully you will discover quite soon that we hardly ever live from within outwards; instead we respond to incitement, to excitement. In other words, we live by reaction… We are completely empty, we do not act from within ourselves but accept as our life a life which is actually fed in from the outside; we are used to things happening which compel us to do other things. How seldom can we live simply by means of the depth and the richness we assume that there is within ourselves.
Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Learning to Pray
No creature ever falls short of its own completion.
Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground
Dogen
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