Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 292– 10/4/2017

 

today on the feast day of St Francis, a celebration of radiance is oh so perfect and even more so as we are on the cusp of the full moon, eleven hours away…

after bathing in the radiance of a puppy being of love in ecstatic motion, we take off for the Moonviewing Festival of O-Tsukimi beginning in the tea house with a sacred  ceremony reminding us to go back home and shine… so, we saunter around the garden as the sun sets and the moon rises in the east bathing in the potent transformative light waves of  this moon of mastery manifestation calling in the field of imaginal cells we are for us all to breathe together, to breathe in the beautiful world that always is and is always becoming…

are you hearing her/our breaths? feeling the enlivening? luxuriating in the radiant waves washing us and polishing the mirror of our one heart?

may we awaken to our radiant true nature…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 291– 10/3/2017

 

May the poor find wealth,
Those weak with sorrow find joy.
May the forlorn find new hope,
Constant happiness and prosperity.
May the frightened cease to be afraid,
And those bound be free.
May the weak find power,
And may their hearts join in friendship

~

To be alive now is to be battered by massive storms and threatened by mass violence. Some things, like the Las Vegas act of domestic terrorism, cannot simply be stated with words, traditional cultures had songs and rituals to help people carry and express things that could otherwise crush the human heart. May we come together in song in the midst of increasing chaos and the rhetoric of division and blame to re-member that an underlying unity exits at the level of the human soul.

may we awaken…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 290– 10/2/2017

 

“As high over the mountains the eagle spreads its wings, may your perspective be larger than the view from the foothills. When the way is flat and dull in times of gray endurance,
may your imagination continue to evoke horizons.”

~ John O’Donohue ~

the unspeakable tragedy of yesterday magnifies the wholehearted commitment to every day of this openhearted moon being devoted to cultivating  a heart of compassion breaking wider open with every suffering, every travail, every loss…

on a day such as this, may we all come together  reaching out our hands to feel the love we are passing through from one to another to another as we stand together in love for love seeing the world as a peaceable kingdom, being a culture of peacemakers…

let us return to the deep celtic wisdom of  Brother John echoing from the depths of the eternal sea…

“Either we are in the universe to inhabit the eternity of our souls and grow real, or else we might as well dedicate our days to shopping and kill time watching talk-shows… Let’s not let our days fall away like empty shells and miss all the treasure… The sacred duty of being an individual is to gradually learn how to live so as to awaken the eternal within you.”

may we awaken…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 289– 10/1/2017

 

welcome, openhearted october, a moon where every day the pilgrimage is a devotion to cultivating the green bough, the open heart of flowing love, peace and joy! i pray you awake today with a child’s open heart and a beginner’s mind somewhere aware that this beautiful moment of sharing the astonishing light of being has been quietly forming and waiting for the perfect moment to present, to presence….

thanks be for courage kindling our one sweet heart to open to what is and to trust the destination is the journey… we don’t have to know where we are going, how could we in this river of life that’s fluid and dynamic, moving from moment to moment only asking that we simply be open, one with the tides of life…

today, we travel along the mighty Columbia witnessing the devastation of a fire started by human hands and celebrating the beauty of the green boughs still alive in the gorgeous gorge…

deep bow to green tara, goddess of enlightenment and compassion, for revealing this moment of  surrendering suffering to the river of joy always flowing…

may we all open our one heart as wide as the sky, as deep as the ocean and smile at this revelation of  new life… the green bough promising all is well…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 288– 9/30/2017

 

today is such a special blessing the space moment as we close this sacred moon of september, a moon of being silently drawn by the pull of love – thank you, dear Rumi, and happiest of turns around the sun…

blessing the space of a moon of our witnessing the world turned upside down on both inner and outer planes, one long moon moment of resetting…

join me now on this high sand dune with panoramic water views to celebrate the fire dissolving into water, to savor the harvests of the trials faced, the suffering now seen as the grace of awakening, the bittersweet letting go of the small protective self in service to the higher purpose of the all that is…

thank you for sitting with the council of elders around the central sun as we reflect upon and share the full filling moments that live forever…

A Brave And Startling Truth

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

~ Maya Angelou ~

may we all awaken today…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 287 – 9/29/2017

 

the heart sutra

liberates all suffering

magical mantra

~

today is World Heart Day and the perfect day for the heart of teachings from the Buddhist Wisdom tradition on emptiness, the heart of compassion…

compassion is empathy for suffering arising from the heart’s valorous capacity to recognize universal kinship and belonging, transforming resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into kindness for al beings… compassion mandates that we extend understanding, warmth, sensitivity, and openness to the sorrows of the world in a truthful and genuine way…

the Sanskrit word for heart is hridayam, meaning “that which receives, gives and circulates…”

may we radiate lovingkindness and compassion every breath…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 286 – 9/28/2017

 

Holy Synchronisiddhi!
it’s been that kind of day… a day of deep peace of the running wave, a day of mysterious wisdom of the stilling wave, a day of dancing in the stillpoint witnessing rainbow bubbles…
riding the wave of heart wisdom right into the center, the temple of emptiness
where….
there’s nothing to hold onto…
~
This is the picture I prefer: In the middle of the river, with the shoreline out of view, the raft begins to disintegrate. We find ourselves with absolutely nothing to hold on to. From our conventional standpoint, this is scary and dangerous. However, one small shift of perspective will tell us that having nothing to hold on to is liberating. We could have faith that we won’t drown. Holding on to nothing means we can relax with this fluid, dynamic world.

~ Pema Chödrön ~
~

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 285 – 9/27/2017

 

each moment, well-lived, makes yesterday a dream of happiness and tomorrow a vision of hope… so, look to this moment for it and it alone is life…

what a deep sea journey the last seventeen days are, the last eight days and how perfect today, this moment to rest in the shifting tides in this moment of great turning…

floating in the sea of equanimity, deep in the recesses of our one heart, i carry you with me in our one heart, we are all carried as one  in the sea of boundless love energy…

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                      i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
ee cummings

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 284 – 9/26/2017

 

today is  one beautiful moment of amazing grace, all the sweeter for the long and winding road  that the stars guided by pulling the thread of fate, the invisible nourishing cord attached to the soul long before the umbilical cord appears…

today is  one beautiful moment of amazing grace, all the sweeter for returning to this sacred dream space of reflection to contemplate this deep passage of surrendering into love, of coming home to the mystery of interbeing… yesterday, i lived the quest of to be or not to be until re-membering flowed… we live in the multidimensional paradox of both/and, to be and not to be, to interbe…

thousandfold thanks for the crisis of sight with the concurrent danger of blindness and the opportunity of all seeing and thousandfold thanks for moving my feet one more step and one more step and thousandfold thanks for opening the heart a little wider giving a lens to see the quintessential purity of everything…

 

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 283 – 9/25/2017

 

as a child, i began hearing this little ditty flowing through…

my life is the poem i would have writ

but i could not both write and live it

were i to have a tombstone, these are words i’d love carved into the stone… the words are so perfect for today, for this deep passage into surrender, surrendering to the moment, surrendering to love, to beauty…

~

in the poem below, some ideas about how to be living poetry, how to be fire of creativity…

~

This is what you should do:
Love the earth and sun and animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people…
reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
dismiss what insults your very soul,
and your flesh shall become a great poem.

~ Walt Whitman ~

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