November 11 is Veteran's Day. Thank you to all who serve
your country.
And to their families who also serve and miss their loved
ones.
This is my parents during WW11, Dad was wounded by shrapnel
while serving on
a ship in the Pacific. He was nearly left behind for dead on
that ship. We all had
a better life thanks to the GI Bill making him the first in his
family to go to
college. However the high fever he suffered from his wounds
damaged his heart
and shortened his life to 57 years. I still miss him. I do not
know how to sort
sacrifices into big and small, nor would I want to
measure one person's loss by another.
I simply want to say, "Thanks, Dad".
MUCH HAS BEEN SAID
Much has been said about the
eternal and untouchable nature of love, its tidal
ungovernable forces and its emergence from beyond the ordinary,
but love may
find its fullest, most imagined and most courageous form when it
leaves the
abstractions and safety of the timeless, the eternal and the
untouchable to make
its promises amidst the fears, vulnerabilities and
disappearances of our
difficult, touchable and time bound world. To love and to
witness love in the face
of possible loss and to find the mystery of love's promise in
the shadow of that
loss, and in the shadow of our own inevitable disappearance may
be where the
eternal God of origins stands most in awe of the full
consequences of our
incarnation.
If God said,
"Rumi, pay homage to everything
that has helped you
enter my
arms."
there would not be one experience of my life,
not one thought, not one feeling,
not any act, I
would not
bow
to.
~ Rumi
from November TAT Forum
"How do you swim?" he
began after a silence. "You throw water behind and
behind you, that's how you propel yourself. Spiritual life is
the same; you keep
throwing everything behind, as you go on. This is the only way;
there is no
other."
~ Irena Tweedie, from
Daughter of Fire: Diary of a Spiritual Training with a
Sufi Master. Published by The Golden Sufi Center, Point Reyes,
California.
Unless you let the truth of life
teach you on its own terms, unless you develop
some concrete practices for recognizing and overcoming your
dualistic mind, you
will remain in the first half of life forever, as most humanity
has up to now. In
the first half of life, you cannot work with the imperfect, nor
can you accept
the magical sense of life, which finally means that you cannot
love anything or
anyone at any depth. Nothing is going to change in history as
long as most people
are merely dualistic, either-or thinkers. Such splitting and
denying leaves us at
the level of mere information.
Whole people see and create
wholeness wherever they go; split people see and
create splits in everything and everybody. We are meant to see
in wholes and no
longer just in parts. Yet we get to the whole by falling down
into the messy
parts—so many times, in fact, that we long and thirst for the
wholeness and
fullness of all things, including ourselves. I promise you this
unified field is the
only and lasting meaning of "up".
Adapted from Falling Upward: A
Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
