Tag: spirit

Sunday Morning

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philippe-conquet

Today, at the sacred site of your soul, make peace with your present reflection as you go in search of the body and face you were born with and excavate the many extraordinary faces that have evolved during your many lives…

Embrace the lines that stare back, the parts that sag in the middle or stick out where you think they shouldn’t, the hair that never keeps a curl or never loses it. Invoke the Tibetan poet Saraha’s psalm of praise:

“Here in this body are the sacred rivers; here are the sun and moon as all the pilgrimage places. …I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body.”

~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, from “Our Pilgrimage Places” in Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self

 

Notes: Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: Philippe Conquet

Walking Cross-Town. With Spirits.

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feather-light-weightless

The subway rumbles underground, the earth trembles under my feet. Out of the corner of my eye, a flourish and a rustle. I turn.

Blue waste paper twirls in a whirlwind. It spins upward in the current before landing gently on the concrete in front of the hulking sky scraper.

Odd.

It’s 6 am. A still, windless morning in Midtown. A single piece of wastepaper lifts the Blues, lightness fills the cavity.

I turn my head back to see it stir.

Zeke?

Is that you?

 

Notes:

 

Oh, yes. I feel that.

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legs-light-sun-toes-feet

He had said,
‘Sometimes I feel quite distinctly
that what is inside me is not all of me.
There’s something else, sublime, quite indestructible,
some tiny fragment of the universal spirit.
Don’t you feel that?’

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

Credits: Quote Source: Memory’s Landscape. Photo:  Miradas (via Mennyfox55)

Sunday Morning: Nothing more than a face in a raindrop.

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black and white, raining, rain,

At this moment, there must be more raindrops falling on the surface of the island than there are humans on earth, perhaps more than all the humans who ever lived. I’ve thought of raindrops as tiny and insignificant things, but against the scale of earth itself, they’re scarcely smaller than I am. On what basis, then, can I consider myself more important? Koyukon elders say that each kind of weather, including rain, has its own spirit and consciousness. If this is true, there must be a spirit within every raindrop, as in all else that inhabits the earth. In this sense, we are two equal forms of being who stand in mutual regard. I bend down to look at a crystal droplet hanging from a hemlock needle and know my own image is trapped inside. It’s humbling to think of myself this way. In the broader perspective of earth, I am nothing more than a face in a raindrop.

~ Richard Nelson, The Island Within

Image: freefoto.com

Sunday Morning. Human Spirit. Gratitude.

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turn-pages-gif

You wake up this morning. You may be a bit stiff from your work-out yesterday. Or still recovering from your long work week. But you can and do get up and get on with your morning.

The first thing you have to get used to is total helplessness. You’re dependent on somebody else for everything. If you want your ear scratched, you have to ask. You soon learn that you can’t ask every time the problem arises, or you’d be asking the whole day. And you remember all too vividly the itch that assailed you in the middle of the night before last, the one that wasn’t worth waking somebody up to relieve.

You grab your cup of coffee and your book.  Or the morning paper. You turn the pages.

Another personal loss, for me, is books. The act of writing has been distorted, yes, but not as much as the act of reading, which was always a solitary pleasure. Since somebody else has to turn the pages, the solitude is over. Few works that I want to read are available as audiobooks. The alternative, of my not being able to read at all if there’s mental degeneration, is horrific.

Q: Where do you find an invalid? A: Where you left him. His words. So much truth, so much spirit.

I’ve been immobilized for five years. In addition to losing incalculable personal pleasures, like daily walks with my wife, I also lost a musical career as a jazz and classical guitarist, though I still teach a few advanced students. I published several books of fiction and nonfiction before the disease hit, but my days of roaming the world as a journalist are over. Now I write by dictation. […]

You find yourself, unavoidably, living in the past. Happiness isn’t is, but was. You try not to contemplate the future too much. Nor the future of the person you love.

Read Anthony Weller’s inspirational essay in wsj.com: Paralyzed From the Neck Down.

Find his bio and web page here: AnthonyWeller.com

Photo credit: weheartit.com