The widest thing in the universe

 

GLEANINGS FOUND HERE AND THERE

A wee garden of Springtime ponderings:

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Love makes your soul crawl out of its hiding place.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

Nature does nothing in vain. 

~ Aristotle

The widest thing in the universe is not space, it is the potential capacity of the human heart.

~ A.W. Tozer

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The time of your transformation is at hand. It is always at hand. It is not a question of whether you “have what it takes,” but of whether you take what you have—and then use it.

Take the gifts you have—they are plenteous—and share them with all the world. Apply them to the challenge at hand. Use them and give them in your life as if there’s no tomorrow. Cultivate the desire to do this. If you have the desire, you will have what it takes—precisely because desire is what it takes.

~ Neale Donald Walsch

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

What shall we keep room for in our hearts?

“Evolution is transformation. And transformation is happening all the time. It happens as we learn new things … ” notes author Christine DeLorey.

“Evolution is not an automatic ever-ascending spiritual conveyor-belt,” she adds, “but the result of our ability to face reality, adjust, adapt, and change.”

A key element of our transformative path is contrast, whose intensity and extremes can sometimes seem — and feel — shocking. Even disheartening.

How can we maximize its effectiveness, by seeing what it is pointing to, for our heart’s understanding? What is it helping us remember? And how is it reminding us of all that we do not yet know?

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable,” urges poet Mary Oliver, and theologian Paul Tillich reminds, “The first duty of love is to listen.”

“ … if you are willing to let your heart break completely open, with no internal narrative controlling the opening, you will discover the pure, innocent love that is alive in the core of every emotion, every feeling, everybody,” writes Gangaji.

“It remains pure and spacious regardless of change or loss.”

Once this happens, then perhaps we are equipped at last for what these words of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s invite:

“Make ready thy soul that thou mayest be like the light which shineth forth from the loftiest heights on the coast, by means of which guidance may be given to the timid ships amid the darkness of fog …”

Including those often-timid ships of our own small selves.

 

Becoming a gathering of heaven

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GLEANINGS FOUND HERE AND THERE:

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

~ William James

Evolution is transformation. And transformation is happening all the time. It happens as we learn new things … Evolution is not an automatic ever-ascending spiritual conveyor-belt, but the result of our ability to face reality, adjust, adapt, and change.

~ Christine DeLorey

Quiilt: Joan Haskell

In recognizing yourself as life itself, you are put right-side up. You freshly live your life, rather than thinking it and then trying to live according to those thoughts. …The thinking mind becomes the servant — rather than the master — to the direct experience of life.

~ Gangaji

And finally, a blessing and prayer for every season:

O God! Dispel all those elements which are the cause of discord, and prepare for us all those things which are the cause of unity and accord!

O God! Descend upon us Heavenly Fragrance and change this gathering into a gathering of Heaven!

Grant to us every benefit and every food.

Prepare for us the Food of Love! Give us the Food of Knowledge! Bestow on us the Food of Heavenly Illumination!

~ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá

The inner shapes the outer

We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved.

Man is organic with the world. His inner life molds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it.

The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.

Courtesy: The Heirloom Gardener, John Forti / http://www.jforti.com/

~ Shoghi Effendi 

If an active, actual peace is brought about, the human world will attain to the utmost serenity and composure; wolves will be transformed into lambs … and terrors into divine splendors in less than the twinkling of an eye. 

Photo: David Campbell / http://www.GBCTours.com

~ ‘Abdu’l-Baha

If you want to change the fruits, you will first have to change the roots.

If you want to change the visible, you must first change the invisible.

~ T. Harv Eker

 

Growth’s leading edge

Photo: D. Kirkup Designs

“What I have come to understand is that my path involves my heart.

It can’t come after the fact.

It has to be the leading edge of my method.

Photo: Van Berkum Nursery

And in a devotional path, we work with forms in order to transform our own identities.

And, in the process, we break the habits we’ve held as our realities and our own self-definitions.

And the new realities, the new concepts we take on, because they were taken on intentionally, don’t have the same hold over us that the old ones had.

It’s using a skillful means to get rid of one thing when later we will get rid of that aid

as well.”

~ Ram Dass

The allies of soul-making

Image: Lauren Chuslo-Shur

So many thoughtful souls keep us company when we’re on a path of creating.

“Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem,” said Rollo May.

Kurt Vonnegut said, “The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.”

“People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore,” Anna Quindlen has noted. “It’s so much easier to write a résumé than to craft a spirit.”

Photo: Lara Kearns

“Weaving, writing and painting our stories into the things we create is a way of feeding the Holy in Nature, which has kept us fed and alive,” says Toko-pa. “And as we put all of our lostness and longing into the beauty we make, we do so knowing that we may never hope for more than to pass on these heirlooms to the young ones so they may find their way home across the songlines, as we have been found by those who made beautiful things before us. If even one generation is denied their inheritance, the story and the way home may be lost. As it is said in West Africa, ‘When an elder dies, a library burns to the ground’.”

And finally, this beautiful encouragement from Craig Paterson: “Whatever difficulty you may be working through today, find a point of solace in art. Let it be both comfort and crucible, to rest your weary heart and to transform the dense dark matter of your troubles into something new and clear. Make beauty and vulnerability your allies in your brave journey of becoming.”

The beginning in the endings

“Evolution is transformation. And transformation is happening all the time. It happens as we learn new things …

“Evolution is not an automatic ever-ascending spiritual conveyor-belt, but the result of our ability to face reality, adjust, adapt, and change,” says Christine DeLorey, author of Life Cycles: Your Emotional Journey To Freedom And Happiness. I also highly recommend her http://creativenumerology.com/ site.

Fall is that time when so many endings seem to arrive at once, as the summer skies in which our dreams have soared in days of endless light grow overcast, like the darker mornings that are pointing us toward winter.

The intensity of contrast can be shocking when it appears; perhaps even disheartening. It reminds us of all that we do not yet know, and of the freedom in embracing that.

Every autumn, a part of me feels sad, as well as reminded, and also — like those spiked hulls from which such bright shiny chestnuts emerge — freshly broken open, once again.

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable,” urges poet Mary Oliver. Theologian Paul Tillich reminds,“The first duty of love is to listen.”

“ … if you are willing to let your heart break completely open, with no internal narrative controlling the opening, you will discover the pure, innocent love that is alive in the core of every emotion, every feeling, everybody,” writes Gangaji. “It remains pure and spacious regardless of change or loss.”

Once this happens, then perhaps we are equipped at last for what these words of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s invite:

“Make ready thy soul that thou mayest be like the light which shineth forth from the loftiest heights on the coast, by means of which guidance may be given to the timid ships amid the darkness of fog …”

Including those often-timid ships of our own small selves.

Photos courtesy Nelson Ashberger.