Tag Archives: self-love

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If pain, sorrow, regret, confusion or fear are appearing in your present experience right now, do not turn away, do not use the labels ‘dark’ or ‘negative’, do not assume any kind of cosmic deviation or ‘sin’. For these are sacred and intelligent life-movements, all, undivided from the vastness of creation, waves of the limitless ocean of Self. They are your beloved children, all, forgotten movements of yourself, longing for your warm presence – a moment of undivided attention. “Remember me!” they cry, one last time, and will you ignore them today? Or will you finally accept your birth right? Will you remember that everything you long for is already appearing, disguised as everything you reject?

Will you remember that you cannot be anywhere other than Home?” ~ Jeff Foster

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.

Winter Sun

Posted on by Standard 4
Winter Sun: Photo by Noelle

Winter Sun: Photo by Noelle

Winterscape barren as white bones picked. Edges sharp, light and dark. No color and much shadow till it weighs the heart to stone. All life in movements of sugar dust winds at high speeds across the now crusted snow. Crows cling to power lines as cattle huddle on grassless slopes. It hurts to look. To wrap oneself tight feels the only comfort. A lonely hug in a bereft land, silent, but for the wind.

Willfully, I force the aperture open wider than nature allows taking in angled rays, piercing and yet strangely soft in brilliance. Hitting the retina at full force I refuse to blink. Face warming despite wild, moisture sucking winds I open my arms wide. An invitation I give; opened and exposed. The cold strokes my warm belly as if it were a lover. I tolerate the chilly caress with shivers to remind I am no fool. I wait, each breath a blacksmith’s billows, for all treasures want for my patience. Then it comes as she tips along the mountain ridge.

Diamonds alive in the snow. Pinks and yellows arc across the lens with halos in green. Sunlight refracts off tearing lids bouncing back with a light of my own. Pupils snap wide as the eyes see what was there, but ignored – a rich, cornflower colored blanket surrounding the Earth. A blue sky as deep as Spring waters and endless as a sea. The heart quickens. It feels life and nearly breaks in exaltation of a winter’s suns penetration down to the soul. Warming the optic nerve, a pulsating signal to a wintered heart. Quiet my soul has slept in the cold, dark hours of December, but the great orb offers her hand now to dance. How could any spirit refuse a winter’s solstice waltz? Surely, I cannot.

Silent Revolution

Posted on by Standard 3
Image and quote re-posted from Meditation Masters Facebook page

Image and quote re-posted from Meditation Masters Facebook page

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.” ~ Jim Morrison

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.

Let Them Run

Posted on by Standard 4
Re-posted from Enchanted Nature's Facebook page

Image re-posted from Enchanted Nature’s Facebook page

I want freedom. Freedom from a tongue bound by convention. Freedom of thought that need not be harnessed back like horses wild. Let them run, I say. I want freedom of time that has no tick. No deadline. It belongs only to me. I am the boss who’s burning that midnight oil for inventions that build a life. My life. I want freedom of style as I slip on skinny jeans, GoGo boots and too much eyeliner. I want freedom of money, mullah, bank, green dogs braying with a jingling, jangling pick me up off my sad ass, hard times, hard luck self. I want freedom of space. Open plaines and wind swept deserts. Where I can walk a mile or ten in my crusty, beat up hikers and no one holds my line to any destination I desire. I want freedom of heart. Open it up wide as a storm gray clam glistening with sea water and pearls, while it still holds the grit I earned honestly. I want the freedom to love you. Love you as I take you into my skin, bury you deep in my belly and warm you up like mama’s stew. I want the freedom to open myself to possibilities and disaster. Good times and crazy adventure. I want freedom that only a bird knows. Alone, in a winter wood, with nothing but silence and every branch I own.

Work in progress from The Writing Church Writer’s group hosted by Marj Hahne, Boulder, CO. Inspired by the poem “What Do Women Want” by Kim Addonizio

Masted Ship

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Bing free stock photos

Bing free stock photos

Your mistakes are your discoverer’s map. The means upon which you travel all seas ahead. You are no yeoman peeling potatoes in the galley. You are the captain and master of your vessel. All captains must know the feeling of beaching their vessel, losing their north star, struggling against the sea to hold the rudder on course to truly know the art of navigation. You must be willing to stand with a spent sail, no wind and no discernible idea where you are to develop the talents for finding your way home. This is how you come to feel deeply your metal.

To flay your heart, a tuna on the deck for the mere miss of a red light, a promotion not received, a misspoke word, or the bus not caught is to spend your life little more than the tie man grabbing the lines of other’s ships pulling into your port. We treat our sacred selves as slaves captured on lone islands doomed to a life of servitude, our light little more than a flicker. See more broadly not merely the horizon you travel toward, but the very helm upon which you stand. Your spirit is not in the dinghy. Regardless what your mind deceives you with as you look in the mirror, be assured. Your divine light is on a great masted ship and your sails are full.

Communion

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Re-posted from the Mind Unleashed Facebook page

Image re-posted from the Mind Unleashed Facebook page

Long lines winding up an aisle in incense fog to papery offerings. A feeding of our soul so sterile I am drifting out the door before my mouth opens to receive. Receive what, exactly? Paper, bread, body, blood of Christ. A distorted figure that makes no sense, as I furtively glance at red dripped cross hanging, hanging, hanging for centuries that is an eternal damnation to a heart stuck on butt-worn bench. Sinner ever waiting to be clean. Sit, stand, kneel, sit stand, kneel. Tongues curling round words spoken in mindless cadence that eyes glaze from the loss of meaning. Cold seeps from stone floors into my shoes and all the wiggling toes will not warm my feet. I cough hard to shake the religious congestion loose, purulent and thick with dust.

Doors swing wide. Light pours in. Air fills my lungs.

Communion is the hunger flowing from my spirit alive and green. Running in open fields and winding up forest trails; exploding like Niagara out of the great northern territories. Communion that permeates my skin with loving rain and grounds my feet in Spring mud, a crocus rising at the equinox. Communion that fills me with such wholeness I can no longer tell where I end and dandelion seed begins its journey on the wind of my billow’s breath. Communion flooding the senses with peach juice down a child’s chin and autumn’s smoke of leaf fed fires the incense that opens the nostrils. Communion so sweet my mouth is filled with its mystical wonder and I sing out, an early morning robin alerting all to a day’s break. Communion that is an opening of the heart into a river that floods the delta with endless meandering trails that follow no crafted, structured pattern or timely release. Communion with the unknown, unrehearsed, unpredictable wonder of spirit. Now, on every breath, bookless hands raised to a midnight moon. For that I am famished, parched and deliciously ready to devour.

Working piece from Front Range Writer’s Group on reclamation of words. Marj Hahne facilitator.

Girls of Autumn: Photo Poem

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Light Trails: Phot by Noelle

Light Trails: Photo by Noelle

A recent study demonstrated that light-emitting photons continue to emit light for up to twenty-eight days, AFTER, the photon had been removed. That is, the light the photon gave off when it was at a given point in space and time would still exist in that space and time even after the photon had moved on. They found the average degradation of that light was approximately twenty-eight days. Give this some real thought. Imagine as you move through your day that you are quite literally walking through light trails everywhere you go. Not discernible to your naked eye, but there, nonetheless. Look at these little girls running, dancing amongst cattail particles on a sunny day. They are not merely dancing in cattail dust, but dancing in light that is refracted off of every surface that autumn sun hits. And even after the photon hits and leaves, its light gift remains floating there for you to touch. The negative of this picture captures this idea for me, as each little girl appears to be leaving a light shadow.

Psychiatric and therapeutic circles spend a great deal of time discussing what Carl Jung referred to as our “shadow”. The side of us we don’t want to see or confront. Our ‘darker’ aspects. But what if the real story isn’t in our darker side, per se, but in our light shadow? What if, by confronting our darkness what we really find is a light trail we are leaving everywhere we go? What if the trail isn’t a dark shadow at all, but like those light-emiting photons we are leaving light wherever we go?

My favorite Thomas Merton quote goes:
“There is no way to tell people they are walking around shining like the sun.”

Hard to get people to believe, but I will tell you all the same. You are walking around shining like the sun and as in the photograph, you are leaving a light shadow everywhere you go. Embrace that today. Namaste