” This is what goes on happening to each mind- you long for something, it will happen, but be the time it happens you will see that you are still discontent. Something else is creating misery now.
This is something to be understood- if your desire is not fulfilled, you are frustrated; if it is fulfilled, then too you are frustrated. THat is the misery of desire. Fulfilled, you are not fulfilled. SUddenly many new things arise.
…
Unless a person is happy, simply happy for no reason at all, unless a person is mad enough to be happy without any reason, the person is not going to be happy ever. You will always find something destroying your happiness. You will always find something missing, something absent. And the ” missing” will become your daydream again. “
From Osho, Joy: The Happiness That Comes From Within

“We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world. In the deepest ground of our being we remain in metaphysical contact with the whole of that creation in which we are only small parts. Through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us…The question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world.“ – Thomas Merton, Love and Living

Sometimes I feel like I am making doors. I know it’s more common to refer to icons as ‘windows’, but I think that’s making it sound too pretty, people get wrapped up in a metaphor. I like doors, they are never closed, not here.
It’s as if I am on this side, and divine is on the other side- (though there are no sides, really)- and the place we meet, we co-create, and this work comes into being. It’s always there, it has been there before I even started it, my completing it and putting it on view is so secondary, not even secondary, it’s so down the list. The pulsating energy is there, the presence is there, it comes into form and shape of its own volition. I know I am a part of it, but most of the time I feel like a bystander, a witness, an apprentice, the flow of life is so strong, I just keep putting piece by piece down.

“Most of the luxuries, and many so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind… Man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without.”
Walden, Henry Thoreau

Sometimes I think people exist in various stages of sleepiness and wakefulness; including myself-
there are periods of incredible lightness and bliss and the whole world seems to be buzz with love, and then the disconnect sets in- I sometimes think that is how divine protects me, or us, from overload, allowing me to get used to it, spoon-feeding awareness at first, then taking it further.

…
tremendous divine light, an understanding of how everything, even the most painful of things, is held in divine hands;
the earth is so fragile, so tender, a sense of how a full presence can hold & protect in, even if for a second only;
a sense of “white sands of eternity”;
and then, a complete release;
release of everything, nothing’s left;
divine silence;
a mystery beyond all and yet within all;
a mystical flow and I am bursting at the seams;
it is not I who loves, but God who loves through me;
“me” is so very flaky-labels and definitions are not ‘not divine’, they work, but to a certain point only, they create a boundary, a wall that must come down, be released from the divine temporal into divine eternal;
I am holding onto seams, they are bursting, who will I be? will there be a ‘me’?
It’s a steady spring, flowing through me;
a bright fire has been lit inside, my heart has shattered and replaced by a divine sacred one, or have I had it all along?..

a few quotes…

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.”

Thich Nhat Hanh puts it this way:
“Consciousness is said to be a field; a plot of land in which every kind of seed has been planted – seeds of suffering, happiness, joy, sorrow, fear, anger, and hope. The quality of our life depends on which of these seeds we water. The practice of mindfulness is to recognize each seed as it sprouts, and to water the most wholesome seeds whenever possible.”

Buddha said, “with our thoughts, we create our world.”

“We are endlessly diverse and unique in our hues and textures, but we are also all one; love is expressing itself not only through us bit as us. 

“It is not easy to own and claim love as our true identity and deepest dignity. We cannot describe it in words. We cannot grasp it or treat it as an object. It is not something we can do, a process to go through, or even a specific way to be. It transcends psychological categorization, philosophical comprehension, and even moral judgement. The only way to own and claim love as our identity is to fall in love with love itself, to feel affection for our longing, to value our yearning, treasure our wanting, embrace our incompleteness, be overwhelmed by the beauty of our need.”

From The Awakened Heart, by Gerald May.

Efficiency and Love

“In becoming adults, we have been conditioned to believe that efficiency is more important than love. 

Efficiency is the ‘how’ of life…

in contrast, love is the ‘why’ of life: why we are functioning at all, what we want to be efficient for.” 

From The Awakened Heart, by Gerald May.

“To give all for love is a most sweet bargain. O let me love, or not live!”

Gertrude More, Lover’s Confessions, 1658.