(first part written on Sunday, June 19, 2022)

Jo,

You shine Christ in my heart, our world, and all Creation. 

I love because you have taught me what love is: kindness, gratitude, forgiveness, reaching out, participation, joy, beauty, words, healing, food, remembering, compassion, helping, peace, and so much more.

Today was filled with living splendor. Creation’s symphonic celebration, as trees danced with the wind, birds sang in harmony, and a sweeping cosmic exaltation kept rising up, higher and higher.

A vital awareness came to me.  I was lifted from my small mind… my little thinking (my stifled little self).  Something “dissolved” and I became free.  I entered the truth– I was no longer me, I was wrapped in All/Awe…

I “thought” (existed/vibrated) in the grand Motion, the collective,  universal Consciousness. (The Omega point?).  It was/is a benevolent and generative Reality… an integration, a Presence of/with All. 

And here’s the thing– it is something that is ever before me/us.  Somehow today, I let go of the small confinement of my circular  (and useless) thinking/being, and CHOSE to relinquish me and thus “crossed into” REALITY. 

A new practice (which I’ve heard about through years of Richard’s (and many others) contemplative teaching and postures (prayer/practice)… was at last actively revealed.  

I could go on and on.  Yet my words are just fluff.  There are no words.  Every good thing, each kindness, all beauty through life and its many facets of beauty are mere pointers to that which is Beyond, yet fully present, and ever evolving.

Now it is Monday (June 20, 2022).  As I enter into a new day, it dawns on me that yesterday was the feast of Corpus Christi—Ah!  The body and blood of Christ; a sacred “connector” to so many of the steps in my journey, places and people along the way I have trod, moments of goodness that are yet to unfold. Amen!

“Christ is organically immersed with all of creation, in the heart of matter, and is unifying the world.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only those who see take off their shoes; The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”                Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“And in this God showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”                  Julian of Norwich

“Every thought is an energy  formation.

Like, you could say a little entity

     and it attracts associated thoughts and becomes a bundle of thoughts.

They may arise from your personal,

but very commonly

they arise from the collective.”                            Eckhart Tolle

 

The Knots Untie

Fire is whispering a secret in smoke’s ear,

This aloes wood loves me,

because I help it live out its purpose.

With me it becomes fragrance,

and then disappears altogether.

 

The knots untie and open into absence,

as you do with me, my friend,

eaten by flame and smoked out into the sky.

 

This is most fortunate.  What is unlucky is not to change and disappear.

 

The black soil must crumble to give itself to plants.

Think how sperm and egg become a smiling face.

 

Bread must dissolve to turn into thought.

 

This way leads through humiliation and contempt.

We have tried the fullness of presence.

Now it is time for desolation.

 

Love is pulling us by the ears to school.

Love wants us clean of resentment

And those impulses that misguide our souls.

 

We are asleep, but Khidr keeps sprinkling water on our faces.  Love will tell us the rest of what we need to know soon.

 

Then we will be deeply asleep and profoundly awake simultaneously like the cave companions.

                   Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

 

“The second axial age, beginning with the rise of modern science, is effecting a radical transformation of consciousness. The whole of nature as a phenomenon now reemerges as a global tribe, unus mundus, a seamless thread of humanity woven into the earth’s elements and emerging  from those same elements.  Consciousness of ourselves from the outside is the first stage.”    Ilia Delio

 

“Our human thoughts are linked to nature by non-local connections: what a person chooses to do in one region seems immediately to affect what is true elsewhere in the universe.” Quantum physicist Henry Stapp

 

The purpose of your life is determined by your willingness to move forward. We take those along who wish to see us become even more then we ever were, and we leave those behind who’s steps were never taken in our direction in the first place. Walk with those who inspire you to keep moving forward, for those will be the ones who will show you the next path, and you will be happy to see them walking along side you.  Emerson Clark