Category Archives: spiritual thoughts

Limitless Heart

Posted on by Standard 2
Free Google Photos

Free Google Photos

There’s a point where we simply have to accept there is no limit to how much we can love. That this moment we are in now is always the beginning of our expanding heart. We are never at an end point. Everything you know and can experience is evolving. This Earth, the Universe, plankton in the sea – you. Nothing is stagnant and most certainly not your heart. We have to stop seeing ourselves as limited lovers. We use the moments where we fall short to love to confirm we have boundaries because we fear to step across the horizon. We don’t know who that version of us is, so we accept our frailties as sure signs that this is who we are. Yet those moments are just us cracking the chrysalis. We’re gnawing off the chain, splitting our emotional atom and losing our religion that says, “This is all that I am.”

It’s time we stepped up to the bar, laid down the money and said, “I’m in. I’m in with everything I’ve got. I’ll slay whatever dragons. Today and every day henceforth I am free to love more than I ever thought possible.”

Negative

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Sunset: Photo negative taken by Noelle

Sunset: Photo negative taken by Noelle

The Dalai Lama is quoted as saying, “Sometimes the best thing to ever happen to you is NOT getting what you thought you wanted.” Spiritual evolution comes when we begin to see that the negative events of our life are actually the good things. That these same things, places, events were providing us an opportunity to see the world and ourselves completely differently. That they are meant to strip away our illusions, mainly, about ourself. When you can see beauty and motion and grace in negatives….well…then you are really onto something.

Little Gem

Posted on by Standard 2
Free Bing Photo

Free Bing Photo

“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.”
~ Jedi Master Yoda

Special thank you to Satyam T. Das for posting the quote in “Be Here Now” group on the Insight Timer app

Everest

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Mt. Everest: free Bing Photos

Mt. Everest: free Bing Photos

“The moment you are in now is the best moment you have ever lived”. The sentence has no qualifier. This moment now. Not two days ago or when that lottery ticket hits it’s impossible sequence of numbers. This moment now. Its one of those curious phrases that hangs in your brain on a coat rack of ideas. It has an odd potency like tea leaves read in the bottom of a cup. That phrase stands alone and crystal clear. This moment I am in right now is the best moment I have ever lived. Seriously, if that doesn’t stop your train of thought even briefly at Main Street and Spruce nothing will. This moment now.

You have to dig deep when you embrace it. It doesn’t merely suggest your adventure is happening now, it’s saying unequivocally that your ship has left shore, the sails are full and your sword is fully polished in its haft. Not a journey that’ll start with the promotion you’ve been vying for or the relationship you’ve been hungry to have. Whatever your luck, good, bad, indifferent it’s the best possible circumstances unfolding for you right now to make your story your own. More than this it suggests that the secrets to all the mysteries lie in this ridiculously loud, chaotic, poor, wealthy, busy, mundane, habitual, silent, lonely life you lead. “The moment you are in now is the best moment you have ever lived” is the genie in the bottle. The diamond found in a cardboard box. It’s Everest.

Beginner’s Mind

Posted on by Standard 3
Image re-posted from The Mind Unleashed Facebook Page


Image re-posted from The Mind Unleashed Facebook Page

I thought I was at center. I felt as balanced as a ballerina in Swan Lake. At the place of nirvana where cherry blossoms float down and the world smells of nag champa. Where you aren’t wrestling snakes in the evangelic’s circus tent, but sipping honey from lily cups. One of those cool Zen-catching moments that Ram Dass and Kornfield talk about as casually as the goodness of roasted potatoes at Sunday supper. You know when the sky opens as to Moses and you’re blessed with eternal peace. Then the horns blared and I looked at the dashboard clock. Funny how certain we can be about things, until we’re not.

Time. The time to get from here to there. It haunts me like a wolf. If I can let the time go then I’m catching Phoenix feathers and dropping into downward facing dog, a hawk swooping Earth. Hourglass snatches me up, though, and she is a mean old, nanny demanding I learn my lessons. Feels like someone should have mentioned that time is a whip cracking in your head that’ll be your undoing if you aren’t careful. Instead we are offered lovely chimes to mark it.

I thought enlightenment was a place, like Intercourse, Pennsylvania where it was always funny to touch that spot on a map. That with the right amount of effort and time I’d be there, properly dressed and ready for congratulations. The fattest, blissed out cat, in full lotus that ever walked through the doors of the Ritz Carlton of the Tao Te Ching.

Oh, all of the thoughts you have thunk, little grasshopper.

A work in progress from The Writer’s Church in Boulder, CO. Hosted by Marj Hahne. Inspired by “Elegance” by Fleda Brown.

Sing

Posted on by Standard 2
A study in the formation of frost: Photo by Noelle

A study in the formation of frost: Photo by Noelle

Who should sing the song of goodness and well being into the world? The Buddha? Jesus? Mother Teresa? Why are we waiting for a great leader when we each have a song of love in our throat? We sing our life into being through our thoughts. Offer anger and the world is dark. Offer tenderness and the world is soft. We sing by thinking and we are always singing.

The world needs simple lullabys as children need them for soothing and sleep. And like a baby the Earth does not know its mother’s voice as stage worthy, nor if it be heard by one or thousands. The Earth simply knows our voice as the voice of love.

There are no small acts of love and no common voices. You are Mohammed or Rumi or Osho. So sing. Sing as though the world were your stage and your heart should burst with the love it has to give out. For in truth, that is how it is.

Hildegard I: Little Gem

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Starling Mumuration: Photo re-posted from Enchanted Nature Facebook page

Starling Mumuration: Photo re-posted from Enchanted Nature Facebook page

“Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.” – Hildegard Von Bingen

Enough

Posted on by Standard 2
The Hog Backs: Photo by Noelle

The Hog Backs: Photo by Noelle

I am enough. Who I am today – light or shadow – is enough. There is no other “me” skin hanging, neatly and stylishly pressed in the closet for me to don. There is no other moment than this one either. Thus, it too, must be enough. My past has already caught the noon bus, and, as is its habit, my future is fashionably late.

I am enough and my time is now.