Author: Jo Beall

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 179 – 6/13/2017

Jo BeallLeave a Comment on Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 179 – 6/13/2017

 

let us create a cosmos where PEACE is built with justice and guide by love…

today, i hear of turbulence with climate disaster in Bangladesh taking the lives of 134 souls and hear the echos of a year ago and the largest mass shooting in the USA and i come home to the heart, to the core of our being, the stillpoint of silence, sacred space of peace…

let us breathe in the golden light of the sea of love energy into every wild cell in our body and breathe out everything keeping us from feeling, from being the peace that passeth all understanding and again and again…

aum shantih shantih

aum shantih shantih

 

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 178 – 6/12/2017

Jo BeallLeave a Comment on Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 178 – 6/12/2017

Birdwings

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you are bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralysed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

~ Rumi ~

more and more love

and more and more surrender

more and more love

and more and more surrender

more and more love

and more and more surrender

into the well of love

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 177 – 6/11/2017

Jo BeallLeave a Comment on Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 177 – 6/11/2017

 

for this week’s installment of showing you the astonishing light of being, gaze upon this image of our one ancestral heart overflowing with love…

The Ancestral Heart is beating everywhere…

in the eternal chorus of the ocean singing to the cliff,
in the silent whisper of the stones,
in the coyote howling to the moon,
in the twinkling eyes of children,
in your beloved’s hand holding yours,
in the smile of a stranger,
in the good, the true the beautiful that one can witness all over the planet….

…the question is, am I quiet and still enough to recognize and hear it?

Stop..and listen.

To recognize the presence of those around us is an act of Love..
…an act of Love we that we can perform everyday.

~ Sr Mai Nghiem ~

to anchor in the love you are, to re-member the astonishing light of being, write a letter to yourself celebrating the gifts of your being, the astonishing light of your loving presence.

 

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 176 – 6/10/2017

Jo BeallLeave a Comment on Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 176 – 6/10/2017

 

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

 ~ Emma Lazarus ~

~

Our world and our lives have become increasingly interdependent, so when our neighbour is harmed, it affects us too. Therefore we have to abandon outdated notions of ‘them’ and ‘us’ and think of our world much more in terms of a great ‘US’, a greater human family.

~ Dalai Lama ~

~

I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?
~ Mother Teresa ~

~

Love Your Neighbor…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 175 – 6/9/2017

Jo BeallLeave a Comment on Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 175 – 6/9/2017

 

today’s powerful full moon in Sagittarius  is pouring out light and amplifying consciousness at an exponentially raised frequency… all over the world, this moon of the wise pilgrim navigating the journey is celebrated as the goodwill festival of humanity… one of the three most powerful moons of the year, it falls on the Tibetan Buddhist fest day of Saka Dawa celebrating the Buddha’s enlightenment…

for me, it also marks the two year anniversary of my eye being ruptured wide open and its outer work being done freeing me to work on the images within…

~

Meditate.

Live purely. Be quiet.

Do your work with mastery.

Like the moon, come out

from behind the clouds.

Shine!

~Buddha ~

~

this moon invites us to explore the parts of ourselves that may be hidden from view… so let’s place one hand on our heart and one on our belly and breathe into our hands deeply while asking, “what do you need now, sweetheart?” as we lovingly examine the places within ourselves that might be in fear, judgment, resentment, blame, or resistance to giving ourselves what we truly need… in this way…

Let’s Remake the World
Let’s remake the world with words.
Not frivolously, nor
To hide from what we fear,
But with a purpose.
Let’s,
As Wordsworth said, remove
“The dust of custom” so things
Shine again, each object arrayed
In its robe of original light.
And then we’ll see the world
As if for the first time.
As once we gazed at the beloved
Who was gazing at us.
~ Gregory Orr ~
(Concerning The Book That Is the Body Of The Beloved)

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 174 – 6/8/2017

Jo Beall1 Comment on Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 174 – 6/8/2017

 

Happy World Oceans Day!

“Ocean is a mighty harmonist.”

~William Wordsworth ~

Canada made the original proposal for World Oceans Day in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The day has been unofficially celebrated every June 8 since then, and, in 2008, the United Nations officially recognized it.

Today, I celebrate with a special pilgrimage to the sea of love energy, sacred space of dancing rainbow mystery, such a journey always brings me back to me… is there anything more deepening than listening to mother waters magnetizing us home… than breathing in the rhythms of waves… than flowing and ebbing with the tides under a waxing full moon…

As the First Peoples remind us and live… Mni Wiconi, Water is Life… Like the First Peoples and Sylvia Earle, I think of the ocean as the blue heart of the planet… It is the one true connection of all our relations – let us celebrate her everyday…

To me the sea is a continual miracle; The fishes that swim–the rocks–the motion of the waves…  ~ Walt Whitman ~

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came… ~ John F Kennedy ~

The cure for anything is salt water… ~ Isak Dinesen

 

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 173 – 6/7/2017

Jo BeallLeave a Comment on Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 173 – 6/7/2017

 

The Sun

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

~ Mary Oliver ~

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 172 – 6/6/2017

Jo BeallLeave a Comment on Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 172 – 6/6/2017

 

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~ Wendell Berry ~

may we all rest in grace…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 171 – 6/5/2017

Jo BeallLeave a Comment on Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 171 – 6/5/2017

 

in this moment, this beautiful moment, we savor and offer thanks to sky and earth and sun and moon and stars and ocean and to beloved for breathing us alive…

in this moment, this beautiful moment, we listen to beloved’s hum as we gaze into her flowing mirror pulling us home to the heart ever more deeply…

in this moment, this beautiful moment, we answer beloved’s call to return to the stillpoint of equanimity where we live in harmony…

in this moment, this beautiful moment, we breathe in the rhythm of the waves infusing every wild cell of our one body with radiant love…

in this beautiful moment…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 170 – 6/4/2017

Jo BeallLeave a Comment on Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 170 – 6/4/2017

 

in these turbulent times, i feel so much the need to re-member the astonishing light of being moment by moment and am so greatful for everyone’s holding the space of light, love, compassion and generosity… so today’s image of the astonishing light of being under the waxing moon is a thousand thousandfold thanks for being the light and anchoring it in every cell of the cosmos… and now from John O’Donohue, a blessing to help in those moments of weariness, lonliness, overwhelm and anxiety…

~

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.