Lightly child, lightly


Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.

~ Dan Gerber, “Often I Imagine the Earth” in Sailing through Cassiopeia


Notes:

  • Poem – thank you The Hammock Papers.  Photo: Curtis Moffat Study, Woman Sleeping (CA. 1920) via see more
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

It’s been a long day

Someone’s life,

their attainments

(forgetting that nine-tenths of it is lived on the inside)…

~ A. K. Benjamin, Let Me Not Be Mad: My Story of Unraveling Mind (Dutton, June 11, 2019)


Photo by Jamie Schafer via (aberrant beauty).  Related Posts: It’s been a long day

Lightly child, lightly

i will wade out

till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air

Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
in the sleeping curves of my body

~ e. e. cummings, from “Crepuscule” in Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings by Richard S. Kennedy


Notes:

  • Poem – thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels.  Photo credit.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Lightly Child, Lightly

Strangely, all of life’s problems, dilemmas, and difficulties are now resolved not by negativity, attack, criticism, force, or logical resolution, but always by falling into a larger “brightness” — by falling into the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Richard Rohr, Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

 


Notes:

  • Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels.  Photo: fabrizio massetti with The sunlight in Dongchuan
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

A trio of tulips in an earthenware pot stopped me in the middle of my mind. I had woken abruptly and, still dazed from sleep, mistook the dawn light hitting the petals for the flowers emitting their own luminescence. I crawled to the glowing cups, thinking I was seeing a miracle, my own burning bush. But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off. This also means nothing, I know. But some nothings change everything after them.

Ocean Vuong, from his new book titled: “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel” (Penguin Press, June 4, 2019)

 


Notes:

  • Photo: Tulips @ BT.com.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

~ Philip K. Dick


Notes:

  • Photo: Surrender by Anne-Martine Parent. Quote: Thank you The Vale of Soul Making
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Whispering “yes” instead of screaming no…

Try it. If you’ve tried it before, try it again…

and soften into it…

No need for fancy formulas or prescribed affirmations.

No goal.

Just be.

Right here…

One breath in front of the other.

~ Mirabai Starr, Softening into the Pain


Notes:

  • Photo: Surrender by Anne-Martine Parent. Quote: Thank you Make Believe Boutique
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

It’s been a long day

“I surrender,” I said, first under my breath. Then again, a little louder, “I surrender.” I saw a bird, and another one. Objectively, I was in a beautiful place. Objectively, my body had been strong enough to take me out here. It was the subjectivity, the comparison with where I thought I should be, that hurt. “I surrender.” I didn’t need an answer. I just needed to breathe. To, once again, find meaning in the simplest moments.

~ Eva Hagberg Fisher, How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship. (HMH Books. February 4, 2019)


Notes: Photo by Alexandra C. Axelina via EyeEM (via Mennyfox55).  Related Posts: It’s been a long day

It’s been a long day

I am only a little better at giving in than I used to be,
at slowing down,
at sitting still.

But progress is progress.

~ Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country 

 


Notes:

It’s been a long day

 

Why all this huffing and puffing,

as though you were carrying a big drum

and searching for a lost child.

~ Chuang Tzu, (369 BC – 286 BC) from The Complete Works Of Chuang Tzu Translated by Burton Watson


Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly

One of the Japanese words for mind is kokoro. The word koro is the onomatopoeia for “rolling along.” Something that rolls like a ball is koro koro koro. So kokoro is something that is always moving and changing, never stopped. There is no object or form that we can identify as mind. It is always changing. Though we are always looking for something to rely on, we cannot find it in something called mind.

~Shodo HaradaNot One Single Thing: A Commentary on the Platform Sutra


Notes:

  • Photo: via Your Eyes Blaze Out). Quote: Thank you Make Believe Boutique
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Lightly Child, Lightly

Time and again I was seeing that if I could handle the winds of the current storm, they would end up blowing in some great gift … Challenging situations create the force needed to bring about change. The problem is that we generally use all the stirred up energy intended to bring about change, to resist change. I was learning to sit quietly in the midst of the howling winds and wait to see what constructing action was being asked of me.

– Michael Singer, from The Surrender Project

 


Notes:

  • Photo: luci d’inverno with luce, luce lontana…(light, far light)
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

It’s been a long day

The Chinese poet Po Chü-I (772-846) recounts in a poem how he’d traveled so long on horseback that he’d fallen asleep in the saddle. For a moment, his reins had slackened. It seemed like an instant but he’d gone a hundred lengths while asleep. He’d exhausted himself all day; prodding the horse to push on; to go here, then there. But in his sleep, he loosened his grip, gave up control, and the horse, which seemed to wait for this chance, carried him easily. This is the tension between will and surrender. We push and push; insistent on keeping pace with the urgency of our dream. All for the moment that we exhaust ourselves. And letting go the reins, the horse of spirit quickens its pace and carries us on.

~ Mark Nepo, Will and Surrender (Huffpost, Nov 6, 2017)


Notes:

Come On Ladies. Let it Go!

forgive-forgiveness-study-chart-depression-psychology-health


Notes:

  • Source and read more at: wsj.com: The Healing Power of Forgiveness
  • Post inspired by: “It’s hard to move on if you don’t forgive,” he said. “It’s like trying to dance with a lead weight on your shoulders. The anger can weigh you down forever.” ~ Diane Chamberlain, Pretending to Dance
  • And inspired by: “I have simplified my life to just three principles, which I try to practice. I cannot say I have mastered them. I attempt. I fall, I falter and I attempt. I call my spiritual rowboat Surrender — complete surrender to the will of the Greater Power. The act of surrendering is so important that Who or What you surrender to becomes insignificant. It is the surrender itself that is important. My two oars are instant forgiveness and gratitude — gratitude for the gift of life. I get angry, I get mad, but as soon as I remind myself to put my oars into action, I forgive.” ~ Balbir Mathur

 

Lightly child, lightly.

motorcyle-abstract-light

She held tightly to his waist again on the way back. It was too loud for either of them to say anything, for which she was grateful, no decisions to be made, nothing to worry over, only the palm trees and tin roofs spinning out behind her, the wind whipping her hair across the face and the warm body close to hers; this moment then the next. Happiness began to burble in the base of her spine and rise, giddily, up her body. So this was what it was like: the present moment. She felt it like a revelation.

And wasn’t this what she’d been after – the lightness that came galloping through, grabbing you by the waist and hauling you along with it? How could you not surrender yourself to it, even if you knew you’d end up sitting bruised in the dirt? She supposed there must be another way to experience that breathless rush of being alive – something inward, perhaps? – but she didn’t know what it was or how to get there on her own.


Notes:

  • Photo: Etsy by Glennis Siverson
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

The light or lack of light is running you. You are the animal, moving and being moved.

moon-miracle-earth-man-insignificant

Sometimes the natural world takes your power, as it does deep in February, when every fiber of your being wants to hibernate. Sometimes it bestows you with power you never imagined you could possess, as it does during the peak of summer, when you don’t need much sleep, and you feel like you’re riding along with all of the motions of the universe. Sometimes it terrifies you with its awesome brutality, as when you are driving alone on a mountain pass and encounter a blustery springtime blizzard. Just as there are receptors in the brain for drugs—like THC and psilocybin—I like to think we have receptors for nature as well. We may believe we are run by our thoughts and anxieties, our urges and our choices, but come to a place like Montana and you will be reminded that the moon is running you. The sun is running you. The light or lack of light is running you. You are the full moon. You are the rushing river. You are the animal, moving and being moved.

Amanda Fortini, The Great Surrender


Image via Your Eyes Blaze Out

 

Surrender

Steven Vrancken with Surrender from his 2011 album “Into Resonance“.

↓ click for audio


Source: Schonwieder

Feel like…

bliss,breathe,peace,relax,chill,


Source: Thank you Carol @ Radiating Blossom

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