Sometimes we turn away from a glance, a look. Sometimes we take the risk of seeing and being seen.
When ARE We?
When are we?
And when does he turn
the Earth and the stars
toward our being?
—Rilke, Sonnet I,3
Becoming Wine
What is your most agonizing experience? If drinking is bitter to you, become the wine.
Metamorphosis
There are so many ways to feel separate. From each other, from the Earth, from "what's going on in politics," from the spirit. It was Rudolf Steiner's key, early insight that the longed-for re-integration of human and world is already present in our every act of understanding. In the instant of understanding itself, we are not separate from what we understand. This unity of self and meaning can be extended to any kind of meaning and any kind of meaning-maker. All sincere dialogue is metamorphosis.
In Love with the Earth
"Can we be more in love with the Earth?" This is one of David Spangler's provocative questions. And he personally answers YES. Rilke does too, and he wants to show us, very intimately, how.
Be Ahead of All Parting
Each week, we touch on the previous week’s meditation theme, just briefly, to help orient us. There is a sense of continuity that can grow from remembering where we were, and continuing on from there. A silent aspect to each of us never forgets anything meaningful. It stands behind the daily threshings and thrashings of our lives, and sifts the gleanings. By bringing our prior meditation to mind, we can remember ourselves as this careful onlooker. Then we’re ready.
Into the Open
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And may all your wishes come true.
Light in Dark Times
Badgers have more photoreceptive rods in their retinas than we do, and they have a reflective layer in their eyes, called a tapetum, that makes their eyes shine in car headlights and that bounces uncollected photons back into the retina. Badgers squeeze more light from their world into their brains than we do. The world gives them the same; they do more with it.
—from Charles Foster, Being a Beast
Experience
I had a GPS system that used to say, as its final command for a given trip, “Arrive at your destination!” The car would have stopped, so I was already there, but it still commanded me to arrive. What is it to stop striving and receive the accomplishment of one’s destination?
Rilke's Key
And why do we care about the dead?
Well, why care about the living?
We are stronger together: that’s one reason.
— Rilke
Rilke's Silence
To be silent. Whoever's more deeply silent… — Rilke
Thanks and Then Some
Listen to the hummingbird
Whose wings you cannot see
Listen to the hummingbird
Don’t listen to me.
— Leonard Cohen
Giving Thanks
If you only had one prayer to say, and that prayer were “Thank You,” it would be enough for a lifetime. — Meister Eckhart
Lighting Candles
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Art of the Possible
Jack Engler said, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody." You need to have a solid ego, that is, well-rooted in the world, before you can dissolve into the totality.