a star

What is it that you contain?  The dead.  Time.  Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut.  Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay.  The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being.  Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.

Your first parent was a star.

~ Jeanette Winterson

celebrate

Celebrate each season, for you too, are transformed with the turns of the earth.

~ Arthur Dobrin

seeds

Is childhood ever long enough, or a happy time, or even a beautiful summer day?  All of these carry the seeds of the same fierce mystery that we call death.

~ Eugene Kennedy

The land of heart’s desire

I look back with gladness to the day when I found the path to the land of heart’s desire, and thank Fate ceaselessly with a loud voice that she did not permit town to sap all the years away while the heart was turning to wind-voices and flower-faces and the hands of kindly earth.

~ Mrs. George Cran, The Garden of Ignorance, 1913

The whole world is self

Don’t disregard your life.  It is too precious.  This moment, right now, is the only life you will ever have.  You can’t store it up for the ideal time.  When you walk, walk with your whole body and mind joining the floor.  Place your eyes in the soles of your feet, walking as if the floor were a dear friend.  This is intimacy with all things, where the whole world is self, where there is no ‘outside’ or other.

~ Pat Phelan

Walking into the here and now

Life is available only in the present.  That is why we should walk in such a way that every step can bring us to the here and now.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

The middle way

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution.  However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution.  We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

~ Pema Chödrön

This everything dance

I like to live in the sound of water, in the feel of the mountain air.  A sharp reminder hits me:  this world still is alive; it stretches out there shivering toward its own creation, and I’m part of it.  Even my breathing enters into this elaborate give-and-take, this bowing to sun and moon, day and night, winter, summer, storm, still — this tranquil chaos that seems to be going somewhere.  This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.  This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

~ William Stafford

Going to the next level

(Approaching the abyss)

We have no where to go (really) but down — eventually we must all let go and jump — it is supposedly that act which propels us to the next level — to enlightenment.  What would bring us to this point — where are we willing to give up the self?  Does the fall into the abyss always result in enlightenment?  How would we know?  What do we have to give up to make such a leap?

~ Hakuin Ekaku

I don’t know how we know.  I do know one of the things we have to give up to make a leap, any leap, is fear.  I’ve had to give it up a few times, to carry on with the commitment I made to get outside every day.  I think it was the commitment that gave me the courage to give up the fear so I could make those leaps.

Or maybe I’m just plain crazy, like The Fool in the Tarot, a card I have long identified with.  Sometimes it takes a little crazy to move on or move up, or even just to carry on.

Born upon thy bank

I was born upon thy bank, river,
My blood flows in thy stream,
And thou meanderest forever
At the bottom of my dream.

~ Henry David Thoreau