Bioluminescence is not rare, scientists have learned. It is so common in the oceans that it ranks as one of the planet’s dominant traits. New York Times, 8-23-17
We go just the way the Way goes.
I-90, for instance, goes all the way to Boston. Not by moving, but by continuous extension to. And that's how Christ goes to the generative mystery, the source, and we go there too.
To Be or Not to Be
There may be little or much beyond the grave But the strong are saying nothing until they see.
-- Robert Frost.
Maranasati
Our group meetings almost always give that most-to-be-desired feeling: the sensation of the holy.
Thou, Silent Form
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought......
Keats
You Again
As soon as I turn to you
as soon as you turn to me
the whole thing is there
words or no words
YOU
The Zen koan or public case is always a kind of dialogue. Someone says something to someone else. Then a realization takes place.
Work
"God, in his work, doesn’t depend on the human to have a place in himself where God could work. Rather, this is the poverty of the spirit: that the human stands there so free of God and all his works that God, to work in the soul, is himself the place in which he might work – and he does this very willingly." Meister Eckhart, 1260-1328
The Life, A Life
Beyond the the life of things and beings of space,
beyond the life of spirit and of time,
there is the life of the totality, the whole.
ALIVE
The miracle of the existence of the world
isn’t limited to the origin, the moment of creation.
It is a miracle, each instant, that it keeps on going
and doesn’t fall back into non-existence.
Like the origin of things, the continuation of things cannot derive from anything within the physical world.
The Gaze
Collodi’s 19th century tale, Pinocchio, is based on the idea that the knot in a piece of pine wood is an eye: Italian pin (pine) + occhio (eye). The wooden boy who becomes real comes from this: the eye of the pine. What if each piece of the world, and the world as a whole, is regarding us, and awaits our answering gaze for us both to become real?
Stealth Blessings
Can we bless someone, or a situation, from far away? Nothing is far away.
Inner Activism
Old friends who had traveled from afar arrived a bit late to group yesterday. Later, they said, “We felt the blessing as soon as we entered the room.”
Blessing Three
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi told a group that there was a magic song the Baal Shem Tov once taught his students, saying if they sang it after his death, he himself would be there among them.
A listener asked Zalman, “So, what is the song?”
“Ah,” he had to confess, “I don’t know the actual words or tune.”
“Oy,” lamented his questioner, “Such a good gun and no bullets!”
Blessing Two
[B]lessing is at the heart of any spiritual practice. For ultimately all such practices are about remembrance, connectedness, wholeness, and being a participant in the flow of love that weaves the world together from the most numinous to the most material…. Spiritual practices are about how we give of ourselves, sharing our life, our presence, and our substance so that the body of creation may be seamless and the infinite may be reflected in the presence of the finite. —David Spangler, Blessing
Blessing One
W. Brugh Joy, MD used to close his emails and letters with the salutation, “A Radiance of Blessings!” With this, he signaled both the solar and shared nature of blessing as an activity. It sheds warmth and light, and it is interpersonal. A radiance.
Archaic Torso
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.