Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#2471 - Sunday, May 14, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Invisible Work
Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and
night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.
There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.
~ Alison Luterman ~
(The Largest Possible Life)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Invisible_Work.html
(left button to play, right button to save)
Happy Mother's Day!!!
A Sufi story:
A disciple visits
his Sufi Master very concerned about a pressing domestic
situation, "Master, I have a problem at home. I can't get my
wife, the mother of
our children, to come to our Sufi meetings to learn from your
most beneficial
teachings. I know because she is just a woman and just the mother
of our children,
she should really come and learn the wisdom as offered in the
Sufi teachings. How
can I get her to come to our meetings and follow the Sufi
way?"
The Sufi Master
replied:
"You need to
know this: the state of Heart of women, and especially mothers,
is
such naturally that they have no need of these teachings. The
purpose of the Sufi
teachings is to bring us men to the level of open-heartedness,
love and service that
women, and especially mothers, already enjoy. Your next task is
to go and learn
from your wife, the mother of your children, the true meaning of
the
posted by Jax to
Dzogchen Practice
Maximum Openness
The only way to
achieve maximum openness is to arrive at every moment without a
single preconception. Otherwise, we resist what doesn't fit our
model. Regardless
of how much we know, or how evolved we've become, we must put
every bit of that
aside. We must step into the mystery naked and undefended. When
we truly hate
what's happening, our instinct is to flee from it like a house on
fire. But if we can
learn to turn around and enter that fire, to let it burn all our
resistance away, then
we find ourselves arising from the ashes with a new sense of
power and freedom.
Sometimes, without any answers to hold onto, it seems like we're
nothing at all.
Other times, overwhelmed by life's roaring torrent, it seems like
we're everything
at once. These two impressions are actually flipsides of the same
coin. They're a
taste of what happens when the barriers of our personality become
porous. We
encounter life directly, without anything to mediate its
intensity. We see clearly, in
those moments, how the self we carry with us is no more or less
than a tool of our
organism, a system that allows us to function, but that also,
miraculously, we have
the ability to step right through.
--Raphael
Cushnir, from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran
It is always possible to discover
more deeply what the force is, what the grace is,
that moves your life. In fact, it is essential to acknowledge
that and to open to
direct experience in the discovery of that. Then you have the
actual choice of
surrendering your thoughts and emotions, your habits and
concepts, surrendering
it all to the grace of the power that is calling you home.
-Gangaji
posted by Xan to Awakened Awareness
What Is The Point?
So what is the point of waiting?
What exactly are you waiting for? Is somebody
going to give you what you always wanted? Will a train come from
Heaven bringing
you goodies? But nothing that could ever happen could be as good,
as precious, as
who you are. What stops you from being, from being present, is
nothing but your
hope for the future. Hoping for something to be different keeps
you looking for
some future fantasy. But it is a mirage; you'll never get there.
The mirage stops
you from seeing the obvious, the preciousness of Being. It is a
great distortion, a
great misunderstanding of what will fulfill you. When you follow
the mirage, you are
rejecting yourself.
--A.H. Almaas, from 365 Nirvana,
Here and Now by Josh Baran
What Would We...
What would we
have to
hold in
compassion
to be at peace
right now?
What would we
have to
let go of
to be at peace
right now?
--Jack Kornfield,
from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran
Letting go of people, of
outcomes and specific plans isn't easy at first. But, why not
respond to the world from the Spirit, the side of me that makes
me peaceful? With patience, I can let go.
--Michael Rawls, The Power to
Endure: