You are free before the sun of the day,
and free before the stars of the night:
And you are free when there is no sun
and no moon and no star.
You are ever free when you close
your eyes upon all that is.
Quotations
Love Letters in the Sand
Empty Dancing
If you are not only to taste freedom but to be freedom, you have to have an absolute
fidelity to Truth, and you have to be wedded to this fidelity forever. If freedom is
going to be a living and ongoing experience, the human part of you has to keep
fidelity with Truth and be committed to living in that Truth. As soon as you break
your fidelity to Truth, you kick yourself out of the freedom of Truth.
A New Set of Eyes
There is no protection against adversity.
There are no guarantees.
What you have is yourself, made
in the image of something very great,
the Greatest thing.
You have yourself, and
the particular circumstances of your life.
What you create
is your measure of love.
What you create
is up to you.
We choose what we will risk.
But only the freedom that drives the risk matters.
The true experience of freedom is having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
This is guilt, if anything is guilt: not to multiply a loved one's freedom by all the freedom we can find in ourselves. We have, in loving, only this one task: to let each other go. For holding on is easy for us, nothing we need learn.
Attachment is the loss of freedom . . .
Non-attachment is freedom . . .
Our destiny is to be free.
EarthLight
Play is our contact with our love for life. It brings us back into our joy at being alive and shows us where our freedom is. Play moves us out of our fixed mindsets: it offers freedom from the tyranny of habit, freedom from the mundane and ordinary, from the rational and need to know and be in control. It's freedom from rigid identification with race, class, gender, and even species.
The Voice of Silence
Often I advised parents that their children needed time to think, to just be -- picking flowers, fishing (for crabs) or admiring glorious sunsets, painting their own images in the firmament as they watch the clouds race by. Little ones are so receptive and thrive on these enriching experiences. Respect for life and every living creature can be instilled into their hearts. All the while I had been giving this good advice, I had been starving my own needy soul with a diet of too much hard work. Taking time to relax is important in our search for freedom: it’s one of the easiest and most delightful ways to feel in touch with the intelligence of the cosmos.
Being authentic is the only pathway to the deepest form of freedom. It means opening to Spirit, mustering courage to move through the challenging process of our life's conditioning. We may encounter surprises and ultimately experience astounding revelations when we uphold our vision to live authentically. Returning to my authentic self, I find freedom.
Being authentic is the only pathway to the deepest form of freedom. It means opening to Spirit, mustering courage to move through the challenging process of our life's conditioning. We may encounter surprises and ultimately experience astounding revelations when we uphold our vision to live authentically. Returning to my authentic self, I find freedom.
The world is filled with the Absolute. To see this is to be made free.
When you are interiorly free you call others to freedom, whether you know it or not. . . . A free man or a free woman creates a space where others feel safe and want to dwell. Our world is so full of conditions, demands, requirements, and obligations that we often wonder what is expected of us. But when we meet a truly free person there are no expectations, only an invitation to reach into ourselves and discover there our own freedom. Where true inner freedom is, there God is.
The Secret of the Beloved Disciple
As I read the prayer I began to sense something amazing. I could hear music, as if someone were playing an instrument in the next room. Then I realized that I wasn't hearing the music with my ears, but with my heart. It was prayer. The prayer was singing itself to me. I picked up my guitar and played along. The music was beautiful, and it continued until I finished the entire song . . . When it was over I realized I had just received an amazing gift. I also knew that one is never given a gift of this magnitude unless one is meant to share it.
Music is a universal language
Taking our differences away.
And when we stand together singing,
We are all the same.
We will sing a song for every season.
We will sing a simple song of peace.
Dona nobis, dona nobis pacem.
Grant us peace, grant us peace
We have lost sight of the original harmony: If you could hear the sound that is produced by the sunflower as it keeps on turning its head toward the sun, the friction between the flower and air, and if you could hear the sound produced by the galaxies, you would hear the symphony of the spheres; and you would realize that this symphony is based upon a basic harmony, the harmony of the spheres.
Spirituality and Health
Two years ago, I heard about a singing class "for people who think they can't." That described me. I mustered my courage, signed up, and found that with proper instruction, I can sing decently! Every week, the deep breathing exercises inspire me; the songs I sing make me and those around me smile. I now understand what I once read: The Australian aborigines say the world was sung into existence.
All one's life is music, if one touches the notes rightly and in time.
Next I saw the most lucid air, in which I heard . . . in a marvelous way many kinds of musicians praising the joys of the heavenly citizens . . . And their sound was like the voice of a multitude, making music in harmony.
Nature a Day at a Time
For some birds, songs are learned by listening to their parents and neighbors during
the first year. For other birds, songs are hardwired -- the music is scored in their
brains from the beginning. For mockingbirds, singing is a lifetime of choir practice
and talent shows, picking up new tunes and modifying old ones.
Sometimes the bird turns away. Sometimes it does not open its mouth to sing. Sometimes it is afraid of the dark. But when it forgets it is afraid and opens its mouth to sing, it fills the world with light.
Silence and music
Ebb and flow:
Beauty of bird-song,
The silence that follows:
Afterglow which warms the heart
Sets us yearning
For our own soul-song:
Journey in silence
Take the path of Mystery
To the music of your heart.
I have never written the music that was in my heart to write; perhaps I never shall
with this brain and these fingers, but I know that hereafter it will be written: when, instead of these few inlets of the senses through which we now secure impressions from all without, there shall be a flood of impressions from all sides; and instead of these few tones of our little octave there shall be an infinite score of harmonies -- for I feel it, I am sure of it. This world of music, whose borders even now I have scarcely entered, is a reality, is immortal.
Gitanjali
Ever in my life have I sought thee with my songs.
It was they who led me from door to door,
and with them I have felt about me,
searching and touching my worlds.
It was my songs that taught me all the lessons I ever learnt;
they showed me secret paths
they brought before my sight
many a star on the horizon of my heart.
All the Days of My Life
We will never "solve" life, crack its ultimate code, or frame it with consistency. It is forever enigmatic and resists control by words or concepts. What is left to us is the rise and fall of a songline and the vision of a Great White Rose.
The music that ushered in the cosmos plays on, inside us and around us.
The Sacred Primer
As I was listening I thought about being in conversation with God, and I was struck by how much Bach's Fugue in G-Minor mirrors my relationship with God. When I first began conversing with God, it was very simple. In reply, God did not repeat my melody but responded in a harmonic way, just as Bach has his instruments do. Over time, our conversation -- the Divine and mine -- has built in richness, complexity, depth and beauty, like the fugue builds. Ebb and flow occur in the dynamics of both music and my communication with God, but my soul is constantly stirred by the heartbreaking beauty of what I hear and what I know.
States of Grace
Experiencing grace involves the expansion of consciousness of self to all of one's surroundings as an unbroken whole, a consciousness of awe from which negative mindstates are absent, from which healing and groundedness result. For these reasons grace has long been deemed "amazing."
You looked with love upon me
And deep within your eyes imprinted grace.
This mercy set me free,
Held in your love’s embrace,
To lift my eyes adoring
to your grace.
There is no authentic and sincere spiritual life without faith, hope and love; but there is no faith, hope, and love without mystical experience or, what is the same
thing, without grace.
The Christ of the Celts
The gift of nature is the gift of "being"; the gift of grace is the gift of "well-being." Grace is given to reconnect us to our true nature. At the heart of our being is the image of God, and thus the wisdom of God, the creativity of God, the passions of God, the longings of God. Grace is opposed not to what is deepest in us but to what is false in us. It is given to restore us to the core of our being and to free us from the unnaturalness of what we are doing to one another and to the earth.
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.
How Then Shall We Live
This much I have learned: within the sorrow there is grace. When we come close to the things that break us down, we touch those things that also break us open. This is the point of healing: when we have told the story, we can leave the story behind. What remains is hidden wholeness, alive and unbroken.
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
Getting Free
Probably one of the first strokes of grace in my life is my father's become totally paralyzed when I was eight years old, because it led me to become the kind of person I am now. Sometimes we understand grace only in retrospect. If someone were to ask me what grace is, I would probably respond, "It's all grace."
Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
The Nature of Personal Reality
The state of grace is a condition in which all growth is effortless, a transparent, joyful acquiescence that is a general requirement of all existence. Your own body grows naturally and easily from its time of birth, not expecting resistance but taking its miraculous unfolding for granted; using all of itself with great, gracious, creatively aggressive abandon. You were born in a state of grace; it is impossible for you to leave it. You will die in a state of grace . . . You cannot "fall out of" grace, nor can it be taken from you.
Babette's Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny
We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble . . . But the moment comes when our eyes are opened and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, friends, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty.
Something for Nothing
Grace is what happens when openness to chance yields a deeper awareness of the cosmos or one’s place in it . . . when luck leads to spiritual insight . . . Proust called chance experiences "earth experience of grace."
Something for Nothing
Grace is what happens when openness to chance yields a deeper awareness of the cosmos or one’s place in it . . . when luck leads to spiritual insight . . . Proust called chance experiences "earth experience of grace."
The winds of grace are always blowing.
It is for us to raise our sails.
In the Shadow of God's Wings
Grace happens! Grace seldom comes as a profound, single, life-changing event. More often it emerges as a whisper, yet it can carry a person through the next few hours or even days: mornings when I shared bagels and coffee with a friend who listened, offerings of food when I could not begin to plan dinner for the family, phone calls that came at those low moments to lift my spirits and remind me that I was still connected with others, the memorable sermon or anthem that touched my soul in a way I cannot describe. Grace happens!
Anam Cara
Spring is a youthful season coming forth in a rush of life and promise, hope and possibility. At the heart of spring, there is a great inner longing when desire and memory stir toward each other. Consequently, springtime in your soul is a wonderful time to undertake some new adventures, some new project, or to make some important changes in your life; there the rhythm, the energy, and the hidden light of your own clay work with you. You are in the flow of your own growth and potential.
The tiny petal
of a tiny flower
that grew from a tiny pod . . .
Is the miracle
and the mystery
of all creation and God!
The whole of Creation is but one sacred temple of the One who created it.
The Nature of Nature
One's relationship to nature is a deeply personal experience. To some it's best represented by a walk in the park, or along the river, or under a summer night's sky. To others it reaches its pinnacle in the study of a smell, a sound, the sight of a bird's egg, a gray whale, or lodgepole pine. And while all of nature is laid out before us to appreciate, not all is understood, known, or even knowable. But about human nature we do know at least one thing, which is that it embodies an irrepressible and infinite ability to create, to express, to give, and to share.
Dear Friend
All around me the precious quiet of evening and the pungent smell of hay in the air. Above me the starry sky. Such a sweet inner peace fills me and gently takes possession of every fiber of my whole being and existence. And one surrenders to her, great Mother Nature, fully and completely and without reservation, and says with open arms, "Take me."
The old tree of eternal creative life lives with an open heart, very deep roots, and many branches waiting to transform into new life.
The Solace of Open Spaces
Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.
The House of Breath
I felt myself a steady, fixed point on the earth round which a whirling gathered and spun a center. Then it was that I seemed to be no one, to belong to no one, and suddenly beholding the russet light of the turning sumach tree in the pasture, I thought,
I am leaf and I am wind and I am light. Something in the world likes faces and leaves and rivers and woods and wind together and makes of them a string of medallions with all our faces on them, worn forever round our necks, kin.
God's Grandeur
Nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness
in deep down things;
And though the last
lights off the
black West went
Oh, morning,
at the brown brink
eastward, springs . . .
Because the Holy Ghost
over the bent
world broods
with warm breast
and with ah!
bright wings.