Ascending Reflection of a Descending Grace
This is a picture of a friend who is 98 years old.
**
The following poem/prayer is by Deena Metzger, and is from the book Prayers for a Thousand Years, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon:
God, in Your form of Beauty, be with us.
May our hearts be broken. May our prayers be sufficient to feel the heartbreak of God.
We want to be God in all the ways that are not the ways of God, in what we hope is indestructible or unmoving. But God is the most fragile, a bare smear of pollen, that scatter of yellow dust from the tree that tumbled over in a storm of grief and planted itself again. God is the death agony of a frog that cannot find a water in time of the drought of our creation. God is the scream of the rabbit caught in the fires we set. God is the One whose eyes never close and who hears everything.
Even if nothing can be fixed, let the vision reconstitute us through a pinhole in time and space - a vision of the lonely God carrying the burden of universal sorrow. Let us take Her in our arms. Let us stroke His temples.
These are our tasks. Let us learn the secret language of light again. Also the letters of the dark. Learn the flight patterns of birds, the syllables of wolf howl and bird song, the moving pantomime of branch and leaf, valleys and peaks of whale calls, the long sentences of ants moving in unison, the combinations and recombinations of clouds, the codices of stars. Let us, thus, reconstitute the world, sign by sign and melody by melody.
Let us sing the world back into the very Heart of the Holy Name of God.
--Deena Metzger in Prayers for a Thousand Years, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon
*
Gratitude
is an
Ascending
Reflection
of a
Descending
Grace.
Beverly Novak
*
"You are called and you answer automatically. Something in you responds, but at the same time you hate it. You refuse your orders. You say, "no, I can't do it. I'm not worthy. I'm too busy. I don't have the capacity. I'm too old, too lazy, too fat, too thin, too timid, and, besides, I think you have the wrong person." But there's no choice and no excuse. So, you go forth with great reluctance, and things turn out badly. Yes, there are moments of great insight, and narrow escapes, and heroic turns, but, basically, you wander around in circles back in the desert for forty years, fighting with your family and friends, until you finally come close to the goal, but you die before you get there. This sounds like my life. Maybe yours too. Maybe this is everyone's life.
Buddha spoke of suffering; his whole teaching comes down to suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to the end of suffering. But, if you think about Buddha's teaching very carefully, you can understand that Buddha was not saying that suffering is to be eliminated, removed like you would remove a growth by surgery. He was saying that suffering, when it is appreciated and really understood, and fully, radically, accepted as it really is - as empty of any real nature of suffering - as the shape of life itself, then suffering is transformed. There is freedom, not from suffering, but within it."
- Norman Fischer
Everyday Zen
**
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them,"
- Alan Watts, English mystic, writer, and lecturer
*
I've known my friend, pictured above, since I was a teenager. The thing that I've always admired about her, the thing that always seemed so extraordinary about her, is her gift of being able to be in present time. All the current and past 'Be Here Now' gurus have nothing on her. I've never met anyone who could enjoy just about anything as much as she does. She seems to dwell little on the past. It's always seemed more to me to be a gift, not something that she was 'working on' or trying to achieve.
This is just a brief and inarticulate expression of gratitude for her presence in this world.
May we all aspire to be that for someone.
**
Cross Posted to Alive on All Channels
**
The following poem/prayer is by Deena Metzger, and is from the book Prayers for a Thousand Years, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon:
God, in Your form of Beauty, be with us.
May our hearts be broken. May our prayers be sufficient to feel the heartbreak of God.
We want to be God in all the ways that are not the ways of God, in what we hope is indestructible or unmoving. But God is the most fragile, a bare smear of pollen, that scatter of yellow dust from the tree that tumbled over in a storm of grief and planted itself again. God is the death agony of a frog that cannot find a water in time of the drought of our creation. God is the scream of the rabbit caught in the fires we set. God is the One whose eyes never close and who hears everything.
Even if nothing can be fixed, let the vision reconstitute us through a pinhole in time and space - a vision of the lonely God carrying the burden of universal sorrow. Let us take Her in our arms. Let us stroke His temples.
These are our tasks. Let us learn the secret language of light again. Also the letters of the dark. Learn the flight patterns of birds, the syllables of wolf howl and bird song, the moving pantomime of branch and leaf, valleys and peaks of whale calls, the long sentences of ants moving in unison, the combinations and recombinations of clouds, the codices of stars. Let us, thus, reconstitute the world, sign by sign and melody by melody.
Let us sing the world back into the very Heart of the Holy Name of God.
--Deena Metzger in Prayers for a Thousand Years, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon
*
Gratitude
is an
Ascending
Reflection
of a
Descending
Grace.
Beverly Novak
*
"You are called and you answer automatically. Something in you responds, but at the same time you hate it. You refuse your orders. You say, "no, I can't do it. I'm not worthy. I'm too busy. I don't have the capacity. I'm too old, too lazy, too fat, too thin, too timid, and, besides, I think you have the wrong person." But there's no choice and no excuse. So, you go forth with great reluctance, and things turn out badly. Yes, there are moments of great insight, and narrow escapes, and heroic turns, but, basically, you wander around in circles back in the desert for forty years, fighting with your family and friends, until you finally come close to the goal, but you die before you get there. This sounds like my life. Maybe yours too. Maybe this is everyone's life.
Buddha spoke of suffering; his whole teaching comes down to suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to the end of suffering. But, if you think about Buddha's teaching very carefully, you can understand that Buddha was not saying that suffering is to be eliminated, removed like you would remove a growth by surgery. He was saying that suffering, when it is appreciated and really understood, and fully, radically, accepted as it really is - as empty of any real nature of suffering - as the shape of life itself, then suffering is transformed. There is freedom, not from suffering, but within it."
- Norman Fischer
Everyday Zen
**
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them,"
- Alan Watts, English mystic, writer, and lecturer
*
I've known my friend, pictured above, since I was a teenager. The thing that I've always admired about her, the thing that always seemed so extraordinary about her, is her gift of being able to be in present time. All the current and past 'Be Here Now' gurus have nothing on her. I've never met anyone who could enjoy just about anything as much as she does. She seems to dwell little on the past. It's always seemed more to me to be a gift, not something that she was 'working on' or trying to achieve.
This is just a brief and inarticulate expression of gratitude for her presence in this world.
May we all aspire to be that for someone.
**
Cross Posted to Alive on All Channels
