Be not afraid to seek the Treasure within,
To discover the beauty hidden in the heart's garden.
For as you root out the weeds of fear,
peace, love, truth and joy begin to flower;
Light radiates out from your
inner garden to all the world.
Quotations
Meditations and Mandalas
Journal Notes
The journey toward our beauty is a magnificent struggle. Achieving an integrity between what we believe and how we live is a challenge worthy of the gift of life. A thousand obstacles stand between ourselves and the honoring of our truth. A thousand distractions. (A thousand ego-generated delusions). To dive down, find the beauty, nurture it and offer it to the world is magnificent. Staying with your beauty, your truth, your integrity is difficult, but out of these things comes meaning, and meaning is all-transcendent.
My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's beauty.
Heart and Soul
Beauty is luminous radiance. Beauty is lucent, mystical essence, he face that is unforgettably lovely, the dance with the exquisite movements that our minds cannot erase, the music whose notes repeat themselves endlessly in our hearts. Beauty infuses; beauty enthralls; beauty inspires and illumines; beauty lifts up and enlivens our souls.
Sweetwater Wisdom
Life is a spiral, slowly moving through the seasons and cycles o four lives. If we are balanced in our actions, creating beauty and harmony within our spiral, we are following the path of right action, the path we strive to follow... To balance the spiral we must participate in our becoming well. We must learn not to be judgmental, not to be dragged down by grief, anger and negativity, forgetting the joy, passion, generosity and kindness of life. Beauty is no threat to the wary. You can walk in beauty and still sack groceries or change diapers...
The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross
Let us rejoice, Beloved,
Let us go forth
To behold ourselves
In Your Beauty.
Where Silence Is Praise
Beyond finite beauty — the beauty that we see — is a depth of infinite beauty from which all created beauty comes, and to which it must return to find its fulfillment. This is the light in which all works of art must be immersed, if they are to touch the depths of all being and of all hearts.
God is at the deep center of all things; there we find eternal life. Every creature gifted with reason has received light to see in all created things both their own individual beauty and that of the Supreme Being, from whom they have received their being, and who sustains them in it. With the light given us we can see God in all things and come into harmony.
Warm sun. My worship is a blue sky and 10,000 crickets in the deep wet hay of the field. My vow is the silence under their song. I admire the woodpecker and the dove in simple mathematics of flight. Together we study practical norms. The plowed and planted field is red as brick in the sun and says: "Now is my turn!" Several of us began to sing.
The Nature of Music
Music is sound AND silence. It is the spaces BETWEEN the notes that create rhythm, melody, and meaning, and the greater the composer -- and the perfornance -- the better the quality of the silence. Legendary pianist Artur Schnabel said that it wasn't the notes but the silences between them he played better than other people. A few seconds more or less at crucial moments in the performance of a piece may mean the difference between a mundane and a transcendent experience.
A Leg to Stand On
Music has a divine message and messenger of life. It was quintessentially the "Quickening art" -- quickening my soul with this my body, so that suddenly, spontaneously, I was quickened into motion, my own perceptual and kinetic melody, quickened into life by the inner life of music. I was carried ahead by the ongoing musical stream.
The interior place where we experience God is the same kind of place and as real as the place here we experience music and poetry.
STAR WARRIOR
"Wake up! SEE!"
Suddenly from where I lay, I did see. I saw that as he shoveled, the coal had a song. Grandfather had a song, even the pickup truck had a song. I saw that Grandfather heard the song and that he shoveled in harmony with it. He was like a symphony conductor. I realized that what I saw was the maximum-efficiency, minimum-effort law he had been teaching me earlier. While I had struggled against myself during the long hospital ceremony, Grandfather had been conducting an orchestra, a ceremonial symphony.
"I see you got it. You see, everything has its song. Find the energy, the song, and merge wíth it. You must seek the harmonic and merge with it."
The Questions of Heaven
When I asked the old man if he believed in the healing power of music, he laughed at first, and then suddenly grew serious. "I forget everything when I play. All my heart goes into the music. If I don't concentrate, the music changes, so it's best to forget all distractions and just play."
When the violin
Can forgive the past
It starts singing.
When the violin can forgive
Every wound caused by others
The heart starts singing.
Meditations on the Tarot
The world is full of implicit religion, and the inspired saints and poets, who say that the birds "praise God" when they sing, are in no way mistaken. Because it is their tiny life itself which sings the "great life" and makes heard, through its countless variations, the same news which is as old as the world and as new as the day: "Life lives and vibrates in me." What homage to the source of life is expressed by these small streams of life: the birds which sing!"
If each of the birds in the forest waited until the bird with the most beautiful song could sing, the forest would be silent.
Journey to the East
As I approached the house, I heard the tune whistled of a little song coming from the upper window. I did not know anything yet, but I listened. The tune stirred my memory and some dormant recollections came to the fore. The music was banal but the whistling was wonderfully sweet, with soft and pleasing notes, unusually pure, as happy and as natural as the song of birds. I stood and listened, enchanted, and at the same time strangely moved without having any kind of accompanying thoughts.
Wisdom of Sundar Singh
The fitness of our hearts and thoughts to receive God's spirit is like that of violin strings. If they are properly tuned, in harmony with one another, then the touch of the bow produces beautiful music. If not, then there is only discord. Whenever our hearts are truly ready to receive God's spirit, they will produce heavenly airs and joyous harmonies -- both in this life and in the spiritual world.
The Beejum Book
A few girls were taken to a performance of Johannes Brahms' "Requiem." Teak was the youngest to go, and she sat next to Frau professor. Teak had never been to a concert before. The music was so awesome, so profound, so moving and stirring that Teak's eyes filled with unexpected tears, and she was grateful when the old woman put her arm around her shoulder as if she understood. The muscc to Teak was like an opening into what she thought heaven might be like. Brahms came like a thundering revelation.
When in our music You are glorified,
and adoration leaves no room for pride,
It is as though the whole creation cries Alleluia!
How often, making music, we have found
a new dimension in the world of sound,
As worship moves us to a more profound Alleluia!
Let every instrument, be tuned for praise!
Let all rejoice who have a voice to raise!
And may You give us faith to sing always Alleluia!
Silence is more musical than any song.
I would give you the gift of music hat you might know your own soul.
A Sacred Primer
As I was listening I thought about being in conversation with God, and I was struck by how much this piece of music mirrors my relationship with God. When I first began conversing with God, it was very simple, like the opening of the Fugue. In reply, God did not repeat my melody but responded in a harmonic way, just as Bach's instruments do. Over time, our conversation — the Divine's and mine — has built in richness, complexity, depth and beauty, like the fugue builds. Ebb and flow occur in the dynamics of both the music and my conversation with God, but my soul is constantly stirred by the heatbreaking beauty of what I hear and what I know.
The Boston Globe
For nine years, the first and third Mondays of the month, I am in silence; I do not speak to anyone for twenty four hours. It's life-changing. It has taught me to listen. When we listen with no responsibility to respond, we can listen fully, which allows us to hear so many things we would not hear if we were talking. This did not start as spiritual exercise, but it has become a very spiritual practice. You hear the truth from deep inside yourself.
Song of God
Listen, listen, listen! All that you will ever need to know is already within you awaiting your inner ear. If you seek to understand your past, the answer is within you. If you need direction for today, the answer is within you. You do not have to seek "out there" for answers to your future. It is already within you awaiting your asking. You do not have to go here or there to find Go or the answer to your simplest or highest question. All you must do is be still and listen to the inner still small voice that forever sings the true song.
Listening requires entering actively and imaginatively into the other person's situation and trying to understand a frame of reference different from your own.
If you ask me is prayer heard?
I'll ask you — are you listening?
When someone deeply listens to you,
it is like holding out a dented cup
you've had since childhood
and watching it fill with
cold, fresh water.
When it balances on top of the brim,
you are understood.
When it overflows and touches your skin,
you are loved.
When someone deeply listens to you,
your feet are on the earth
and a beloved land that seemed distant
is now at home with you.
St. Therese of Lisieux
The ordinary circumstances of daily life bring back the same routines, and often the sense of going nowhere! But "nowhere" is where God is most active. God and daily life are always in dialogue and sometimes in a state of war. There is a struggle to figure out what god is saying in the events and circumstances of daily life and how daily life is meant to transform us... Listening to God in silent loving attentiveness, enables us to let go of our preconceptions and over-identifications with the events of daily life, which tends to dominate our emotional reactions rather than invite our free response.
The Sound of Listening
What is the sound of listening? A resonating silence, like the infinite fine line between a grey sky and the ocean, where the horizon cannot be distinguished. My soul blends into the silence around me. Into that silence comes a voice:
"I love you. Do not be afraid. I am with you. I give you my peace. You are always with me."
The words sound sweet and tender, gentler than any human voice.
"Blessed are you. Blessed are you. Blessed," says the silence.
Listing Spirituality
Open, attentive listening can be a form of contemplative prayer. It can be that widest, most open form of being present and attentive, in trust that God is present with us, in expectancy that the Spirit will move in the hearts of those present and that we may be changed inwardly for the good or guided to be part of the upwelling of Life in a particular situation.
Native American Wisdom
Conversation was never begun at once, nor in a hurried manner. No one was quick with a question, no matter how important, and no one was pressed for an answer. A pause giving time for thought was the truly courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation. Silence was meaningful with the Lakota, and their granting a space of silence to the speech-makers and their own moment of silence before talking was done in the practice of true politeness, listening, and regard for the rule, "thought comes before speech."
Listening
Tonight's rain is a tenderness. I can guess from walking in it, touching it; but now I think I know its other dimension, can almost "hear" its sound, tonight close to silence.
The Way of the Dreamcatcher
Every moment is like a gift. And since it is, relax, get into the moment and do all you can to listen to it. I mean, really, really listen. Be present to the moment with everything you. It takes practice. After you've listened for a while, you start responding. You give back because you begin to see how everything is on loan — a gift from God... Try listening, looking. Looking and listening lead into everything else. Real listening means you don't project yourself into the situation. You simply are receptive, seeing things as they are, not as you might wish them to be. Listen!
In the School of Love
Faith and hope lead us to want to have what we believe in and hope for. The more we want it, the more we learn to love it and want to concentrate on it. Our turning to God is made easier if we take practical steps, which include turning away from other things which attract and distract us and going apart in solitude, being still so that we can listen to God.
Angel Voices
If we listen, we will hear.
If we are quiet, the sound increases.
... And so does the Silence,
And so do we.
Blowing Zen
Listening is the gateway to liberation. Learn to listen with your whole being.
The Solace of Fierce Landscapes
To move slowly and deliberately through the world, listening and attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive, even un-American. We cringe from the idea of relinquishing in any moment, all but one of infinite possibilities offered us by our culture. Plagued by a highly diffused attention, we give ourselves to everything lightly. This is our poverty. In saying yes to everything, we attend to nothing. One can only love what one stops to observe. "Nothing is more essential to prayer," said Evagrius, "than attentiveness."
For all its silence, the sky has a language. Without any words the stars speak many things right into our hearts. They hand there so silent and radiant — and how one's breast swells at the thought of being able to attain the same purity. At times it seems as if their light is of little benefit. Yet is is by them that we measure hours, days, and years. By them — or at least by the star nearest to us, the sun — we have light and heart, and our existence depends on it.
Horizons
Creation has been given to us as a clean window through which the light of God could shine into the human soul. Sun and moon, night and day, rain, sea, crops, the flowering tree: all these things are transparent.
Before Life Hurries On
For humankind, a growing gap between our inner selves and outer selves — an imbalance between how we live our lives and how we would like to live them — leaves the spirit thirsting for renewal. For many, renewal and re-creation come with time spent in the natural world. The human spirit and the open landscape are inextricably connected. In feeling the spirit of place, we reconnect with the spirit of self.
Each creature God made
Must live in its own true nature;
How could I resist my nature,
That lives for oneness with God?
Evening Thoughs
Within the universe, the planet Earth with all its wonder is the place for the meeting of the divine and the human.
As It Is In Heaven
Gabriella did not move. She was enchanted. She closed her eyes a moment and felt the coolness of her eyelids and saw the green shadows dancing beneath them. She pursed her lips to taste the moisture of the mountain forest and knew for sure that she was not dreaming. When she opened her eyes, she saw the deer eating the coiled peel of the clementine. It was a moment she would long remember. She would remember it as the mysterious beginning of healing, the untranslatable language of God speaking in nature and stopping the world in a green moment.
Entering the Sacred Mountain
A down feather as soft as an infant's curl floats earthward and brushes the granite rock by my side. It feels like a message from above, and I wonder what it is telling me. I pick up this angel-wisp and hold it to my cheek. I feel it as a caress, a gentle and loving touch, and I realize that this IS the message — one that transcends words, concepts, and thoughts. It touches my heart and a place of inner knowing. In that moment I am complete, thankful, and fully at peace.
Voices of our Ancestors
In the traditional way of life gardens were a ceremonial event for all, an opportunity to give to the Earth as well as to receive. The seeds of good food are also the seeds of good relationship, so caretaking the garden is symbolic of caretaking all beings ... an offering to all.
Hear me, You who have power to make grow! Guide the people that they may be as blossoms on your holy tree. Make it flourish deep in Mother Earth and make it full of leaves and singing birds.
We are, each of us, passive participants in an explosion still in progress. The sparks continue to fly, and in its rhythm, the universe is still expanding from that ancient blast. We are, as they say, star dust, by-products of the Big Bang. In this light, everything is connected, all creation evolving from the same Source, in a process which continues. We are kin to the stars, part of a universal family.
Rumi's World
Those who have eyes to see will discern the message of eternity in the spring breeze when it becomes visible in the roses and herbs: invisible waves of roses, hidden in the breeze, required the medium of the earth to reveal themselves to the material human eye, just as the human beings innate qualities must be revealed by his or her actions. The spirit needs matter in order to become visible; thus every leaf is a messenger from the realm of nonexistene, and talks with its long hands and fresh green tongue of the creative power of God.