Grandmother spoke. "For eighty winters I have lived among you and now the World of Spirit is calling me to the other side. As winter brings to a close each cycle of seasons, so death brings to a close the cycle of our lives. I have loved all of you as my children and you must remember, after winter comes spring; also, after death comes birth and a new beginning.
Quotations
If physical death is the price that I must pay to free
my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death
of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.
Do not fear your death. For when that moment arrives, I will draw my breath and your soul will come to Me like a needle to a magnet.
Death is but a return
to your original Source.
Becoming the Beloved
The death of those whom we love and who love us opens up the possibility of a new, more radical communion, a new intimacy, a new belonging to each other. If love is stronger than death, then death has the potential to deepen and strengthen the bonds of love.
It is only when we have died that our spirits can completely reveal themselves. The spirit of love, once freed from our mortal bodies. will blow where it will, even when few will hear its coming and going.
Grayson
From the tension of the dark empty depths an idea began to emerge. It was that space between not knowing and knowing, that tension between losing and finding, that blank page between silence and song, that emptiness that creates the need to create, to try, to imagine, to solve.
The Zen Teachings of Jesus
Creative people tend to see life's problems as opportunities to exercise their creativity, to explore something new, to build character, to grow spiritually, and to develop self-knowledge. Love, creativity, and gentleness are closely linked. People who are creative and open to life are more able to learn to love others and themselves. Once we learn the art of turning problems into opportunities, there is no more distinction between self-love and the love of others.
Creativity is the urge to wholeness, the urge to individuation or to the becoming of what one truly is. And in that becoming we bring the cosmos into form.
The Inspired Heart
There are creative seeds buried in people, no matter how oppressed they have been, and you can find these seeds in their stories. With the recent extreme rains here, seeds of plants that have been dormant for centuries are sprouting. They have somehow kept themselves alive for all that time. This same potential is always alive inside people.
A mature creative life, which has discovered its source, finds it is linked to everything. Creation actually requires too little from us, and there is not much in our culture that teaches us to pay attention to the things that require less. These things give birth to the unpredictable surprises that inspire a larger and deeper soul connection with creative life. With the soul well tended, even when all is lost, our creation lives larger than its physical limits. The best that any of us can do with the heaven and hell that surrounds us is to become willing participants in the unfolding of our soul's life. Any creative act emerging from this tending becomes one with the elements of the Mystery.
Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is "to fit together" and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating, whether it is to make a loaf of bread or a life.
Meditations and Mandalas
Let us sing to the Creator of the cosmos,
to the divine power of love!
When we look at the wondrous display
of the heavens,
at the Earth with its infinite
variety of life,
Who are we that You love us, that You
rejoice in our being;
that You trust us to care for creation
in all its splendor,
inviting us to become co-creators
with You?
Let us celebrate the mystery of life!
Let us commit our lives to
the Divine Plan!
Marry Your Muse
To live creatively is
to live from the soul,
to shape our circumstances out of our
deepest desires instead of
conforming our dreams to
the circumstances in which we live.
Once we experience the joy,
the power of creating our own lives,
we find that creating in other arenas
comes naturally,
an outflow of abundant energy
that comes with being true
to our essence.
The Rose of the World
Creative work, like love, is not an exclusive gift bestowed on only a chosen few... A sea of love, an inexhaustible wellspring of creativity, bubbles behind the consciousness of each one of us. All creative work, that which is life-giving, that is done in its own name and for its own sake is divine in nature. Through it, people elevate themselves and fill their own hearts and the hearts of those around them
with Love.
When we get out of the way, the wild and creative force which flows through us all will rush into the inlet, the space we have vacated within our everyday selves.
The Isiah Effect
The very thoughts that allow us to hurt another limit our ability to express the will of creation through ourselves. At the same time, each time we love another, we have just loved ourselves. Each time we create time for another, strive to understand another, we have just done each of these things for ourselves. When we disapprove of the actions, choices or beliefs of others, we witness through them those portions of ourselves that ask for a greater healing.
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
In order to create,
I must be still.
Ode (Vol. 3, October 2005)
We can make a difference when we draw on our courage and creativity to stand up for our beliefs. Our small actions carry a cumulative power that can shift the planet onto a more positive course. We only need to tap our innate creativity and connect with expression not only through a particular medium like paint or clay or words; the other medium we all have to express our creativity is our lives.
As human beings, we're innately creative, capable of great love, and creatures of community. When we draw on our natural gifts and act together, we have enormous power to ease suffering and invent new possibilities for a better world.
Traveling Mercies
Coming out of the movie, I realized that I want what the crones have: time for all those long deep breaths, time to watch more closely, time to learn to enjoy what I've always been afraid of--the sad and the invisibility; the ease of understanding that life is not about doing. The crones understand this, and it gives them all kinds of time--time to get much less done, time for all the holy moments.
Signs of God
The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love's unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that leads from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.
We are made of time.
We are its feet and its voice.
The feet of time walk in our shoes.
Sooner or later, we all know,
the winds of time will close the tracks.
Passage of nothing, steps of no one.
The voice of time tells of the voyage.
Sacrament of the Present Moment
Let us become attuned to that Transcendental Being imparted to all things by divine action. It deserves our attention, and those who heed it with an open heart and with confidence and courage need not fear. For divine action has always been the source from which flows a torrent of grace which spreads over everything. Our lives flow unceasingly in that unknown deep where all that is necessary is to love and to accept the present moment as the best, with perfect trust in God's universal goodness.
I resolve to live with all my might while I do live. I resolve never to lose one moment of time and to improve my use of time in the most profitable way I possibly can. I resolve never to do anything I wouldn't do if it were the last hour of my life.
Cat's Eye!
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light, you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.
Mary, Called Magdalene
May we live in today
and never in the future
or the past,
or come too late
to those we love.
The present in which all times
are included, is one:
a unity in itself.
Anam Cara
One of the greatest mysteries in life is the mystery of time. Everything that happens to us, happens to us in and through time. Time is the force that brings every new experience to the door of your heart. All that happens to you is controlled and determined by time. Time opens up and opens out the mystery of the soul.
In Her Time
How you slice up your time also reflects how you identify yourself.
The Secret of the Yamas
Memory is the repository of the past, which is where most of our living takes place. We have divided life into past, present, and future, and this division, like all of our divisions, removes us from the fullness of living, from the mysterious unknown and unknowable movement of life that is the source of all beauty. The past exists only in memory, and the future is merely a projection of past memories. Now, this moment, is all there is.
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She went out one day
in a relative way,
And returned the previous night.
The more sand that has escaped from the
hourglass of life, the clearer we should
see through it.
The Faith Club
We were breaking an unspoken social rule. We were talking about God and religion at a time when the stakes were high, when turmoil and confusion were the order of the day. We were harried, busy mothers, but at our meetings we found ourselves released from Time, suspended from the reality of the outside world. ... Our relationship was turning into something sacred, something we began to call our Faith Club.
Beyond the Dream
In the realm of timelessness we discover God. If we have ever become aware of the moment when we understood something, we must have realized the extratemporal nature of the event. Extemporaneous means outside of time. Indeed, the gift of making extemporaneous comments hinges on our receptivity to inspired wisdom, reaching our consciousness from the realm of the timeless.
When time is a friend, you relish how it works. You know that your purpose is within you and that eventually time will unfold a dream, an integrating vision for your life purpose. ... My future is behind me. I can't see it, while I can see my past which runs out in front of me.
Light tomorrow with today!
Eclipse of the Sun
He was still and gazed deeply into the infinite pool that bears stars into being. Above him was a tiny smudge of light that was the closest galaxy. It was spinning, spinning, but so far away that one could look for a whole lifetime and not see it alter. The galaxies out there whirled into each other like discs, blinding into space without colliding--passing through each other at thousands of miles per second, yet they did not appear to move.
Suddenly he understood: Time is an illusion of the mind. Only love remains.
The signs of God
There is a pressing need for something to be made known, for the secrets of the heart to be made public, for the music of the soul to be played. For centuries lovers of God have held the secrets of Divine Love within their own hearts, shared only with a few. But this knowledge needs to be made public, the song of Love's oneness to be heard. If the music of Divine Love is not played in the marketplaces, life will lose its meaning, and the collective despair of the soul will be too terrible to imagine.
A Prayer from Vienna
The music flows within me like pure spirit.
What a wonderful conversation
within the flow of universal energy!
Eloquence needs no words --
I know this from intimacy with the divine.
O Great One, I give thanks for this
and for all music --
A power line fed into my heart from
the universal grid.
A New Set of Eyes
I heard the first measures of music and was thinking how lovely it was to be in this small church in a distant land. Then a solo voice took over the room, filling everything with its power, and my next breath came with difficulty. I have never, anywhere, heard a human voice so Pure, a sound so penetrating: outside of me, then suddenly inside of me, tearing down resistances I didn't even know I had ... its love so piercing that everyone began to weep involuntarily. When I opened my eyes nothing prepared me for what I saw. The young voice was coming from eighty-three-year-old Jonas, who was singing the "Sanctus," by Beethoven, with a beauty that could not be explained. It was like the Soul of all life summoning each spirit who listened.
Music and Medicine
Music was bestowed on humankind for the sake of effecting harmonious revolutions of the soul within us whenever its rhythmic motions are disturbed. Thus when the soul has lost its harmony, melody, and rhythm, music assists in restoring it to order and concord.
The Contemplative Heart
I once heard the pianist, Arthur Rubinstein, being interviewed. At one point he was asked to share his experience of playing Chopin's Nocturnes. He said in effect, "I do not know what it is. But over and over again I have had the experience of sitting in a crowded concert hall playing the Nocturnes and I can feel everyone in the room waiting for the next note." In this moment of waiting, all present find their contemplative community in their oneness with one another in the boundless mystery that enraptures them.
You wouldn't think
It would be so easy
To forget
Who we really are
Or that death is always at our shoulder
Or that everything is alive
Or that God is everywhere singing.
There is a certain relevance to life
that is hard to hear in the business of the day.
The past and future come pounding on my brain.
It is in the time I spend alone with God
that I tune my soul to the music of the dance.
I can begin to hear the song
in the most wondrous places,
in the most unexpected circumstances.
I am called to the rhythm
and even if no one else has ears,
I enter in the song.
Within this body
The Eternal keeps singing
And Its spring goes on and on flowing.
A Message for Humanity
Consider learning how to sing or play a musical instrument, not for professional reasons but as a way to interact with the angels and to enjoy sound. Recently, I started playing my flute again. When I sit outside and play my flute it is exhilarating . I treasure these moments where I can return to the heaven-sent birds even the most meager reflection of the beautiful music they offer me throughout the year.
Two Minutes for God
We who love music of any type share one thing in common. Music touches us intellectually and emotionally. We love the notes, the rhythm, the percussion--the sound. It stirs us where we live. It speaks to us. ... Maybe our styles of faith differ from one another, but there is one binding love, this one celestial music that supersedes our differences and joins us at our hearts, into God. Loving music of any type makes us similar. Our problem is that we tend to note the differences, not the similarities.
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.
It is my heart
that makes songs,
not I.