blooming contemplations

“Slow down, sink into your gut, be present to what IS, and the universe, nature, and the divine will open to you in ways you cannot possibly grasp intellectually, and in ways you could have never “predicted”. 

Be first. Then Do. In Alignment. 

Embrace the mystery of the unknown, and enjoy the ride. 

It’s what you signed up for.”

Bernhard Guenther

"All through your life, the most precious experiences seem to vanish. Transience turns everything to air. You look behind and see no sign even of a yesterday that was so intense. Yet in truth, nothing ever disappears, nothing is lost. Everything that happens to us in the world passes into us. It all becomes part of the inner temple of the soul and it can never be lost.

This is the art of the soul: to harvest your deeper life from all the seasons of your experience. This is probably why the soul never surfaces fully. The intimacy and tenderness of its light would blind us. We continue in our days to wander between the shadowing and the brightening, while all the time a more subtle brightness sustains us.

If we could but realize the sureness around us, we would be much more courageous in our lives. The frames of anxiety that keep us caged would dissolve. We would live the life we love and in that way, day by day, free our future from the weight of regret."

John O'Donohue

from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”

Diane Ackerman

“Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The Universe buries strange jewels deep with us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”

Elizabeth Gilbert

“The presence and experience of color is at the very heart of human life. In a sense, we are created for a life full of color.

When we attend to color and light, our souls are fed.

Color is the language of light.

Light is the greatest unnoticed force of transfiguration in the world: it literally alters everything it touches and through color dresses nature to delight, befriend, inspire and shelter us. The miracle of color is a testament to the diverse, precise and ever surprising beauty of the primal imagination.

As Goethe said “the eye needs color as much as it needs light.””

John O'Donohue

“My Most Important Relationship Is With My Source… 

There is no relationship of greater importance to achieve than the relationship between you, in your physical body, right here and now, and the Soul/Source/God from which you have come. If you tend to that relationship, first and foremost, you will then, and only then, have the stable footing to proceed into other relationships.

Your relationship with your own body; your relationship with money; your relationship with your parents, children, grandchildren, the people you work with, your government, your world . . . will all fall swiftly and easily into alignment once you tend to this fundamental, primary relationship first.”

Esther Hicks

“There’s a way a disaster throws people into the present and gives them this supersaturated immediacy that also includes a deep sense of connection. 

It’s as though, in some violent gift, you’ve been given a kind of spiritual awakening where you’re close to mortality in a way that makes you feel more alive.

You’re deeply in the present and can let go of past and future and your personal narrative, in some ways. 

You have shared an experience with everyone around you, and you often find very direct but also metaphysical senses of connection to the people you suddenly have something in common with.”

Rebecca Solnit

“In all of us grows a symbolic intuition that brings the sun closer to the head than to the feet. We are all haunted by images that stir sleepily in our depths, enigmas whose solution amounts to the art of living. 

Our reveries are not entirely ours but they bring the key to the existence of the other. When the image lets us go, it gets loose and shakes our tongue. Then, we must speak with hieroglyphic conviction, and lick the lock.”

Enrique Enriquez

a Deeper Well~Dweller

“Chi ha l’occhio, trova quel che cerca anche a occhi chiusi. He who has a sharp eye finds what he is looking for even with his eyes closed.”

Italo Calvino

“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”

Ocean Vuong

“Each day I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life.”

Yo-Yo Ma

“The body is everywhere assaulted by all of our new media, a state which has resulted in deep disorientation of intellect and destabilization of culture throughout the world. In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning and significance and experience of the body is utterly transformed and distorted.”

Marshall McLuhan

“One of the things a poem is is an attempt to encounter: language, time and its peculiar directions, presence and absence, imagery, energy, power, lament and longing. 

A poem is a piece of art, a package of both image and sound. It is filled with absence, too: whether the blank space on the page, or the inhalation of a breath at a pause, a break, a caesura. 

A poem — and this is why I do this work — is an invitation to attention, and as such, it is an experience of physics, too.”

Padraig O'Tuama

“Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the

head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting ~ are universal responses of this mammal body.”

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“The body does not require the intercession of some conscious intellect to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating, it is a life of its own.”

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“Sensation and perception do not exactly come from outside, and unremitting thought and image-flow are not exactly outside. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us. There are more things in the mind, in the imagination, than ‘you’ can keep track of - thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden.”

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“The depths of the mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches ~ the bobcat that roams from dream to dream.”

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“The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track of some of what goes in and out (and sometimes making expansionist plots), and the rest takes care of itself. The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild.”

Gary Snyder

The Practice of the Wild

“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written . . . Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Oliver Sacks

“Instead of near-life experiences, let’s have full-life, now-life ones.”

Colin Goedecke

“Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet 

desperation.”

Barbara Kingsolver

“You have two lives. The second begins when you realize 

you have only one.”

Confucius

“There isn't time ~ so brief is life ~ for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving ~ and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”

Mark Twain

“Let us be grateful to the people who 

make us happy, they are the charming 

gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

Marcel Proust

“Go where the joy is, and go there often.”

Colin Goedecke

“Ye-diddly-i-oh”

sound of a happy camper

“The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed – to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is.”

Parker Palmer

“The human situation is beautiful and strange. We are in fact Gilgamesh and Oedipus and Lear. We have achieved this amazing levitation out of animal circumstance by climbing our rope of sand, insight, and error ~ corrective insight and persistent error. The working of the mind is astonishing and beautiful.”

Marilynne Robinson 

from The World Split Open

“We’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand.”

Annaka Harris

from Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. 

For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust. 

Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for any advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”

Ranier Maria Rilke

from Letters to a Young Poet

“Confront the dark parts of yourself and work to banish them with illumination or forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”

August Wilson

The American poet William Stafford was often asked by friends, readers, students and colleagues: When did you become a poet? 

The response he regularly offered was: 

“The question isn’t when I became a poet; the question is when other people stopped.

The more any of us writes, the more our words will "come to us." If we trust in the words and their own mysterious relationship with one another, they will help us find things out.”

Naomi Shihab Nye

“The future is always the leader….

We live forward into our future, supported by the present, with the past, always faithful, off to the edge, a little sad, a little frail, as the moon, lighting a path through the night, goes with us step by step, shedding its pale friendship on our shoulders

…the vast majority of human beings…are preoccupied with becoming un-preoccupied.

Under their apparent indifference throbs a secret fear of having to solve for themselves the problems posed by their acts and emotions – a humble desire to be like everybody else, to renounce the responsibility of their own destiny, and dissolve it among the multitude.”

José Ortega y Gassett

“A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living.”

Rudolf Steiner

“... my duty as a songwriter is not to try to save the world, but rather to save the soul of the world. 

This requires me to live my life on the other side of truth, beyond conviction and within uncertainty, where things make less sense, absurdity is a virtue and art rages and burns; where dogma is anathema, discourse is essential, doubt is an energy, magical thinking is not a crime and where possibility and potentiality rule. 

The answers to the secrets of the heart may just be there, in the inscrutable dark of the forest, in the unfathomable depths of the sea, at the uncertain tips of our fingers.”

Nick Cave

“Nature loves a mystery and each soul born is a mystery waiting to be revealed, a meaningful story waiting to unfold. No one can prove it, nor can it be simply disproven. But all the old stories depict it and our dreams hint at it and life at critical times requires that we act as if it were true. The awakened individual has always been an agent of change and an assistant to creation ongoing.

Human beings are both a genius production of nature and the genius producers of culture. The awakening of our genius self allows us to deliver the gifts we have been given and contribute meaning as well as beauty to the world. An old idea found in many traditions holds that each person comes to this world of change at a time when they have something meaningful to offer. Meaningful solutions to the overwhelming problems of the world would be closer at hand if it was better understood that each person born bears within them a gift that the world might need.

Everyone intuits the possibility of a greater life; yet this greatness now tends to be imagined as something outside ourselves. Most campaigns that promise liberation—be they political or spiritual, base advertising, or high-energy motivational programs—direct us toward outer goals. Meanwhile, there is a greater self within us that tries to surface at each critical turning point in our lives.

The genius of human nature involves innate capacities for creation and invention that are important in the life of each individual and essential to the balance of the world. The true individual, by virtue of being himself or herself, enters a state of partnership with the ongoing acts of creation and thereby adds something to life that was not there before. When the troubles are all around us, everyone can find some place where they are needed, where they can help heal all that is wounded and help protect all that is currently threatened by radical changes and global disturbances.

To borrow from the genius of Emerson: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” Yet, knowing what to do with the conditions of the world may depend more than ever on knowing that the soul in each of us is naturally seeded with genius and secretly threaded to the Soul of the World.”

Michael Meade

from The Genius Myth

“Reimagine your situation. Give up thinking of what's familiar, or expected, and reframe it instead as what's happening ~ as an open ended, unexpected, unlimited process of what you are really meant to become and do next.”

Rob Brezsny

“The more light you allow within you, the brighter the world you live in will be."

Shakti Gawain

“So tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Mary Oliver

from “A Summer’s Day”

& more to come for you, 

to contemplate, friends, 

as we journey along together

here in The Poetisphere…