The hour is striking so close above me

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear, so sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.

I feel it now: 
there's a power in me to grasp
and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things
and they come toward me
to meet and be met.

Rilke

Some prayers are like spears

Some prayers are like spears.  They carry the whole weight
of the body behind them but they do not travel far.

Some prayers are like arrows flying light
and far and fast but they are never seen again.

Some prayers are like snares scattered in the woods,
ingenious and cunning -- but who knows what they will catch?

No.  You cannot bring down the Holy One with prayer.  He
is not caught in your traps.  Listen -- you are yourself the hunted.

Your prayer is the sudden stillness on the path,
the in-drawn breath, the pounding heart as you scent the wind.

Have you learned this?  Do you know?
You do not seek so much as you are sought.

You cannot pursue the Holy One -- or if you do,
it is only as the fish in the net pursues the fisherman.

- Robert Hudson

COMMUNICATION WITHOUT AGENDA

If we really want to communicate, we have to give up knowing what to do. When we come in with our agendas, they only block us from seeing the person in front of us. It’s best to drop our five-year plans and accept the awkward sinking feeling that we are entering a situation naked. We don’t know what will happen or what we’ll do.

Our true home is in the present moment. To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the Green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and the Beauty that are available now.  Peace is all around us - in the world and in nature.  And within us - in our bodies and our spirits.  Once we learn to touch this peace, we will be healed and transformed.  It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.


- Thich Nhat Hanh

Mind of the Hawk

I
 
The mind that finds fault
with this moment
slips into sadness,

the mind judges or condemns
its own experience
or anyone else’s experience
in this moment.

The mind that dwells on past
or future
wanders about distraught,
building fences
where no animals graze.

The mind that seeks outside itself
is always running from its own fear
like a rabbit moving
in the shadow of some bird
of prey.

Yet outside thought,
there is nothing but clear sky.
The hawk sits on the branch
Leaning out
Over the abyss.

II

In this moment,
Reality is fully present.
Nothing is lacking.

In this moment,
there is nothing to judge,
nothing to fix,
nothing in particular to think
or to do.

Here in the fullness
and precise certainty
of this moment
thought interferes,
the perception of inadequacy begins:
Life is not good enough

Other people are not good enough
I am not good enough
Something is wrong
Something needs to change
for me to be happy.
These thoughts
lead to negative feeling states
as quickly as a knife
cuts through soft butter.

There is no challenge here.

To be compassionate with self
means to accept these feeling states
without empowering them,
to let the wave pass through
even as you stand your ground,

to stand in the truth
even as you feel sadness.
Feelings pass.
They linger only when you identify with them
or resist them.

Neither identifying with feelings
nor resisting them,
feelings wash through,
and the thoughts behind them subside,
like waves breaking on the sand.

As you become present,
you rise above all mental
and emotional states,
because who you are is beyond all states,
beyond all definitions.

In the unconditional acceptance
of here and now
the dream world of symbols,
interpretations, meaning,
comes to an end.

There is no more seeking.
No more striving.
No more finding fault.
Nothing apart from
simple attention in the moment

to the situation at hand.
From “Crossing The Water” by Paul Ferrini

Non Sense

Moment by moment
unfolding, everything just
as it is—
infinitely quiet and empty,
all things are—and right now—
always will be.

Yet the moment
never stops moving—
seed into plant into tree—
every instant dissolves into Emptiness,
no past and no future,
all free.

Nothing to hold but
this moment,
and this moment is slipping away:
this One rides each wave
without moving—
the Sun never sets in the sea.

Richard Wehrman 11/11/07

KINDNESS


Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in 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 everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Tao Te Ching

Fill your bowl to the brim

and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife

and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security

and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people's approval

and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.

                        The only path to serenity.

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That's why we wake
and look out—no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

—William Stafford

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past,
worry about the future, or anticipate troubles 
but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.

~Buddah

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Dancing With God

When I meditated on the word Guidance

I kept seeing 'dance' at the end of the word.

I remember reading that doing God's will is a lot like dancing.

When two people try to lead, nothing feels right.

The movement doesn't flow with the music,

and everything is quite uncomfortable and jerky.

When one person realizes that, and lets the other lead,

both bodies begin to flow with the music.

One gives gentle cues, perhaps with a nudge to the back

or by pressing lightly in one direction or another.

It's as if two become one body, moving beautifully.

The dance takes surrender, willingness,

and attentiveness from one person

and gentle guidance and skill from the other.

My eyes drew back to the word Guidance.

When I saw 'G: I thought of God, followed by 'u' and 'i'.

'God, 'u' and 'i' dance'

God, you, and I dance….

Kristen Bissinger 9/07

Heartwork focus this year is "Presence"

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing: wait without love.

For love would be love of the wrong thing: there is yet faith.

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

                                                                         T. S. Eliot

Heartwork focus this year is "Presence"

Dancing With God

When I meditated on the word Guidance,

I kept seeing 'dance' at the end of the word.  

I remember reading that doing God's will is a lot like dancing.  

When two people try to lead, nothing feels right.  

The movement doesn't flow with the music,  

and everything is quite uncomfortable and jerky.  

When one person realizes that, and lets the other lead,  

both bodies begin to flow with the music.  

One gives gentle cues, perhaps with a nudge to the back  

or by pressing lightly in one direction or another.  

It's as if two become one body, moving beautifully.  

The dance takes surrender, willingness,  

and attentiveness from one person  

and gentle guidance and skill from the other.  

My eyes drew back to the word Guidance.  

When I saw 'G: I thought of God, followed by 'u' and 'i'.  

'God, 'u' and 'i' dance'  

God, you, and I dance....

Kristen Bissinger 9/07

Heartwork focus this year is "Presence"

In studying ourselves, we find the harmony that is our total existence. We do not make harmony. We do not achieve it or gain it. It is there all the time. Here we are, in the midst of this perfect way, and our practice is simply to realize it and then to actualize it in our everyday life.

- Maezumi Roshi

Heartwork focus this year is "Presence"

A Yellow Rose

The great Giambattista Marino did not die that afternoon, nor the next - he whom the combined spokesmen of Fame (to borrow an image dear to him) had proclaimed the new Homer and the new Dante.  

The silent and unalterable event that was now taking place was truly the last of his life. Crowned in glory and long life, the man was dying in a huge Spanish bed with carved corner posts. It is easy to imagine the quiet balcony a few steps away, facing the setting sun; below it, marble statuary, laurel trees, and a garden whose galleries are repeated in a rectangular pool.  

A woman has placed a yellow rose in a vase. The man mutters the inevitable lines that at this point, to tell the truth, he finds a little boring:

Garden's purple, prairie's pomp,

Yellow yolks of spring and eye of April...

It was at that moment that the revelation took place: Marino saw the rose, the way Adam must have seen it in Paradise. He sensed that it existed not in his words but in its own timelessness. He understood that we can utter and allude to things but not give them expression, that the proud tall volumes that made a golden shadow in the corner of his room were not the world's mirror, as his vanity had figured, but simply other objects that had been added to the world.

This realization came to Marino on the eve of his death, as it had perhaps also come to Homer and Dante.

Jorge Luis Borges

{ EMBRYO }

Enveloped in the moist womb of god 

Mystery completely surrounding 

Baring the seed of impending life

Resting in the warmth of possibility

Yielding to all new sensation  

On and on we grow

Valerie Siciliano

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

The Infinite Depth of Your Own Self

 

In order to discover the infinite depth of your own self, you must find a way to enter into a very deep state of meditation—such a deep state that your awareness of thought moves to the background and eventually disappears. When awareness of thought disappears, the awareness of the passing of time disappears along with it, and so does the awareness of the world and all the objects within it. If you keep penetrating into the infinite depths of your own self, eventually your awareness even of your own physical form will disappear. It is enlightening to discover that when thought, time, world, and even your own body disappears, you haven't gone anywhere! Even without the movement of memory, you will find that the most intimately felt essence of your own self—who you always are at the deepest level—remains intact. That self that remains when time and form disappear is eternal and unchanging. It has never been born and will never die. That self is the deepest ground of your own being, in each and every moment, whether you are aware of it or not. Everything that is born, the entire evolving cosmos, arose from that empty ground, and everything that dies will return to it. In that no-place, that zero point, where there is no birth and no death, nothing ever happened and the cosmos never existed. When we discover this dimension of our own self, we find only nothing at all: desirelessness, the fullness of Being, and indescribable peace, without end.

—Andrew Cohen

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

"Man is a thinking reed, but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. 'Childlikeness' has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks, yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the heavens. Indeed he is the showers, the ocean, the stars."  -- Dr. D.T. Suzuki

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

Days of grace, when mind bows to the Beloved.

All existence in perfect harmony with the mystery.

How could it be any other way?

How could any one single moment be in error?

Ah, this moment, full/empty, here; just here now.

The nectar of silence here for all.

Come sit and rest and drink.

Then dance with the only partner you have ever really known.

Laura Sgovio  9/8/09

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

Letting Go

Author Unknown

To let go doesn't mean to stop caring;

It means I can't do it for someone else.

To let go is not to cut myself off...

It's the realization that I can't control another...

To let go is not to enable,

but to allow learning from natural consequences.

To let go is to admit powerlessness,

which means the outcome is not in my hands.

To let go is not to try and change or blame another,

I can only change myself.

To let go is not to care for, but to care about.

To let go is not to fix, but to be supportive.

To let go is not to judge,

but to allow another to be a human being.

To let go is not to be in the middle arranging all the outcomes,

but to allow others to affect their own outcomes.

To let go is not to be protective,

It is to permit another to face reality.

To let go is not to deny, but to accept.

To let go is not to nag, scold, or argue,

but to search out my own shortcomings and correct them.

To let go is not to adjust everything to my desires,

but to take each day as it comes and cherish the moment.

To let go is not to criticize and regulate anyone,

but to try to become what I dream I can be.

To let go is not to regret the past,

but to grow and live for the future.

To let go is to fear less and love more.

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

 Notice  by Steve Kowit

 This evening, the sturdy Levi's

 I wore every day for over a year

 & which seemed to the end

 in perfect condition,

 suddenly tore.

 How or why I don't know,

 but there it was: a big rip at the crotch.

 A month ago my friend Nick

 walked off a racquetball court,

 showered,

 got into this street clothes,

 & halfway home collapsed & died.

 Take heed, you who read this,

 & drop to your knees now & again

 like the poet Christopher Smart,

 & kiss the earth & be joyful,

 & make much of your time,

 & be kindly to everyone,

 even to those who do not deserve it.

 For although you may not believe

 it will happen,

 you too will one day be gone,

 I, whose Levi's ripped at the crotch

 for no reason,

 assure you that such is the case.

 Pass it on.

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

THE ROUND           

Light splashed this morning

On the shell-pink anemones

Swaying on their tall stems;

Down blue-spiked veronica

Light flowed in rivulets

Over the humps of the honeybees;

This morning I saw light kiss

The silk of the roses

In their second flowering,

My late bloomers

Flushed with their brandy.

A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the doors of my house,

So I have trudged downstairs to my cell,

So I am sitting in semi-dark

Hunched over my desk

With nothing for a view

To tempt me

But a bloated compost heap,

Steamy old stinkpile,

Under my window;

And I pick my notebook up

And I start to read aloud

The still-wet words I scribbled

On the blotted page:

"Light splashed..."

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow

When a new life begins for me,

As it does each day,

As it does each day.

Stanley Kunitz

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

"Song of Myself"
by Walt Whitman

from

Leaves of Grass

I have heard what the talkers were talking . . . . the talk of the

beginning and the end,

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now;

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . . . Always substance and

increase,

Always a knit of identity . . . . always distinction . . . . always a

breed of life.

To elaborate is no avail . . . . Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure . . . . plumb in the uprights, well

entretied, braced in the beams,

Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,

I and this mystery here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my soul . . . . and clear and sweet is all that is not

my soul.

Lack one lacks both . . . . and the unseen is proved by the seen,

Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst, age vexes age,

Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I

am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,

Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less

familiar than the rest.

I am satisfied . . . . I see, dance, laugh, sing;

As God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night and close

on the peep of the day,

And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels bulging the house with

their plenty,

Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,

That they turn from gazing after and down the road,

And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,

Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is

ahead?

Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"

***

The last 2 lines are tricky: "to cipher" means to decode or figure out.

By "cent" he means hundredth part; we'd probably say "decimal."

UNCONDITIONAL

Willing to experience aloneness,

I discover connection everywhere;

Turning to face my fear,

I meet the warrior who lives within;

Opening to my loss,

I gain the embrace of the universe;

Surrendering into emptiness,

I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me,

Each condition I welcome transforms me

And becomes itself transformed

Into its radiant jewel-like essence.

I bow to the one who has made it so,

Who has crafted this Master Game;

To play it is pure delight,

To honor its form true devotion.

Jennifer Welwood

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

BACKSTROKE

  

Why should I

solve all the problems of the world?

Who else

has done it,

has come

close?

The earth Herself

gives uncounted

billions a chance.

And she's not even

tallying up a score.

So breathe! 

            Live!

Die!

Holding on anywhere

is so futile.

What you want to do

is slide over

the rim of the waterfall,

    on your back...

         dazzled by the sunlight,

                soaked by the

                      roaring spray!

                 Richard Wehrman

 

Dear Friend of Heartwork,
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Blessings,
Dale

Subject: Check out this cool, free app

I came across this free iPad app called Unstuck that really does help with problem solving, and I thought you'd find it useful too. You can download it from the iTunes store at http://bit.ly/unstuckgift.

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

The Ninth Elegy

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all other green, with tiny waves on the edges

of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze) -: why then have to be human - and escaping from fate,

keep longing for fate?....

Oh not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.  Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which

would exist in the laurel too ....

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once for each Thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,

trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,

in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.

Trying to become it. - Whom can we give it to? We would hold on to it all, forever...  

Ah, but what can we take along into that other realm? Not the art of looking, which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.

The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness, and the experience of love, - just what is wholly unsayable. But later, among the stars,

what good is it - They are better as they are: unsayable.

For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and the blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window - at most: column, tower...  

But to say them, you must understand, oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing. Isn't the secret intent

of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together, that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?

Threshold: what it means for two lovers to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door - they too, after the many who came before them and before those to come ...., lightly.

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.  Speak and bear witness. More than ever the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.

An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.  Between the hammers our heart

endures, just as the tongue does between the teeth and, despite that, still is able to praise.

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one, you can't impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him

something simple which, formed over generations, lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.

Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.  Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours, how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,

serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing -, and blissfully escapes far beyond the violin. And these Things, which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient, they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.

They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart, within- oh endlessly - within us! Whoever we may be at least.

Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise within us,

invisible? Isn't it your dream to be wholly invisible someday? - O Earth: invisible!  What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?

Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over - one of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.  Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.  You were always right, and your holiest inspiration is our intimate companion, Death.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future grows any smaller.... Superabundant being wells up in my heart.

                                    Rainer Maria Rilke

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

All the Hemispheres Leave the familiar for a while. Let your senses and bodies stretch out Like a welcomed season Onto the meadow and shores and hills. Open up to the Roof. Make a new watermark on your excitement And love. Like a blooming night flower, Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness And giving Upon our intimate assembly. Change rooms in your mind for a day. All the hemispheres in existence Lie beside an equator In your heart. Greet Yourself In your thousand other forms As you mount the hidden tide and travel Back home. All the hemispheres in heaven Are sitting around a fire Chatting While stitching themselves together Into the Great Circle inside of You. ~ Hafiz

Heartwork focus on "Letting Go" with Awareness

THERE ARE TREES on the coast stripped of bark, stark silver white, and without the bark one can see how the very wood is twisted so the dead tree seems to be like a corkscrew rooted in the earth. There are people who think that only people have emotions like pride, fear, and joy, but those who know will tell you all things are alive, perhaps not in the same way we are alive, but each in its own way, as should be, for we are not all the same. And though different from us in shape and life span, different in Time and Knowing, yet are trees alive. And rocks. And water. And all know emotion.

There are rocks on the coast, which, like the trees, seem corkscrewed, seem to twist upon themselves, as if in agony. Whirlpools and riptides are the same, only different. All because they have seen Sisiutl and tried to flee.

Sisiutl, the fearsome monster of the sea. Sisiutl who sees from front and back. Sisiutl the soul searcher. Sisiutl whose familiars are often known as Stlalacum, the vision people, those who ride on the wind and bring dreams, the Stlalacum who search out the chosen and those who would see beyond the externals.

Sisiutl moves freely in water whether salt or fresh, even in heavy rain, for he is able to transform himself. He seeks those who cannot open through their fear, who do not have a Truth.

Fearful he is and terrifying. His eyes send cold fire into your belly and his forked serpent tongue flashes horror at your soul. No words could explain Sisiutl, who looks like a snake, but has no tail, rather a head at both ends, each head more fearsome than the other, and from him emanates cold and horror.

When you see Sisiutl you must stand and face him. Face the horror. Face the fear. If you break faith with what you Know, if you try to flee, Sisiutl will blow with both mouthsat once and you will begin to spin. Not rooted in the earth as are the trees and rocks, not eternal as are the tides and currents, your corkscrew spinning will cause you to leave the earth, to wander forever, a lost soul, and your voice will be heard in the screaming winds of first autumn, sobbing, pleading, begging for release. Lost, no part of the Stlalacum who know Truth, no part of anything, alone, and lonely, and lost forever.

The bark flew from the frightened trees leaving only the twisted wood exposed. Only the roots, deep in the earth, kept the trees from falling upward into the void.

When you see Sisiutl the terrifying, though you be frightened; stand firm. There is no shame in being frightened, only a fool would not be afraid of Sisiutl the horror. Stand firm, and if you know protective words, say them. First one head, then the other, will rise from the water. Closer. Closer. Coming for your face, the ugly heads, closer, and the stench from the devouring mouths, and the cold, and the terror. Stand firm. Before the twin mouths of Sisiutl can fasten on your face and steal your soul, each head must turn towards you. When this happens, Sisiutl will see his own face.

Who sees the other half of Self, sees Truth.

Sisiutl spends eternity in search of Truth.  In search of those who know Truth. When he sees his own face, his own other face, when he looks into his own eyes, he has found Truth.

He will bless you with magic, he will go, and your Truth will be yours forever. Though at times it may be tested, even weakened, the magic of Sisiutl, his blessing, is that your Truth will endure.

And the sweet Stlalacum will visit you often, reminding you your Truth will be found behind your own eyes.

And you will not be Alone again.

FROM:  DAUGHTERS OF COPPER WOMAN

BY:        ANNE CAMERON