Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
Gratitude opens a crack in consciousness that lets grace in.
Sandoz turned and accepted the book, looking at the spine. "Aeschylus?"
Wordlessly, Guiuliani pointed out the passage, and Emilio studied it a while, slowly translating the Greek in his mind. Finally, he said, " ' In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, againstour will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.' "
"If only we could realize that our purpose is to be caretakers. We are responsible for leading our flock to the place where the grass is green, but it is up to them to eat! We cannot be responsible for how much they digest. We cannot make people mature. Yet many ministers are exhausted from playing God. We have worn ourselves out trying to be spiritual policemen. Sometimes we’ve done it through ignorance; other times, for fear of being ridiculed by our peers for having problems in the sheepfold. It is enough to be responsible for ensuring that our people have the opportunity to graze in the rich grass of God’s nutritious word. Beyond that, we must trust the word to take it’s effect. It will work faster in some people than in others. the spiritual body grows and metabolizes food at different rates much like the natural body does" [ Bishop T.D Jakes]"If only we could realize that our purpose is to be caretakers. We are responsible for leading our flock to the place where the grass is green, but it is up to them to eat! We cannot be responsible for how much they digest. We cannot make people mature. Yet many ministers are exhausted from playing God. We have worn ourselves out trying to be spiritual policemen. Sometimes we’ve done it through ignorance; other times, for fear of being ridiculed by our peers for having problems in the sheepfold. It is enough to be responsible for ensuring that our people have the opportunity to graze in the rich grass of God’s nutritious word. Beyond that, we must trust the word to take it’s effect. It will work faster in some people than in others. the spiritual body grows and metabolizes food at different rates much like the natural body does" [ Bishop T.D Jakes]"If only we could realize that our purpose is to be caretakers. We are responsible for leading our flock to the place where the grass is green, but it is up to them to eat! We cannot be responsible for how much they digest. We cannot make people mature. Yet many ministers are exhausted from playing God. We have worn ourselves out trying to be spiritual policemen. Sometimes we’ve done it through ignorance; other times, for fear of being ridiculed by our peers for having problems in the sheepfold. It is enough to be responsible for ensuring that our people have the opportunity to graze in the rich grass of God’s nutritious word. Beyond that, we must trust the word to take it’s effect. It will work faster in some people than in others. the spiritual body grows and metabolizes food at different rates much like the natural body does" [ Bishop T.D Jakes]
With new hope, We build new lives. Why complain when it rains? This is what it means to be free.
The soulful connections we share are the most essential elements of being alive.
This is how I find compassion
I stand between a tree and the sun
I remain until I can find the luminescence in aspen bark.
I continue because I seek the core of truth in every being.
This is how I find grace:
I surrender to water.
I surrender to the rock.
I obseve sensations on the surface of my skin.
This is how I practice gratitude:
I peel a tangerine.
I give away all it's quarter moon sections,
Allowing the fruit of service to introduce me to strangers.
With open palms,
I walk into the fire of life.
The soul needs no shelter from the sun.
I remember that everything is a part of me.
In my world
I seek the divinity of all things.
Finding an eagle feather on the corner of mystery,
I pick it up, holding it between my body and the sun.
Celeste Labadie 2003
Do or Do Not There is no try.
"The nearer anyone is physically and morally to the source of holiness, the more grace he receives."
"Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route."
"My brother, Reverand Run, who's what I like to call a "Christian yogi", has his own term for it. He calls it a "State of Grace", that space where you can walk around and practice love in everything you do. To walk around all day with a smile and, instead of seeing the world as bad, simply seeing opportunities to make the world better."
Grace Happens (seen on a bumper sticker)
The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human by nature, endeared to each other.
Spirit is in a state of grace forever
Your reality is only spirit
Therefore you are in a state of grace forever.
Do not assume that divine guidance flows only when you are in need of help. Guidance continues to flow whether or not you have problems. It transcends problems, heartbreaks, and traumas, flowing through dreams and illuminations.... Whether guidance comes during times of tranquility or trauma, however, it is up to you to have the courage to acknowledge it....
Silence is a learned practice that requires far more than just not talking. Not talking is not silence; it's just not talking.
Contain your experience with the divine so that it does not escape you but rather shapes you. Be silent. Silence will help you avoid engaging in the games of competition and illusion that regularly seduce us in the outside world. Silence also helps you avoid distraction. It helps focus the busy mind---the mind that always has to be doing something, thinking something, the mind that always has to be otherwise engaged lest it become introspective and allow the soul's voice to override its own. The silence I am describing is a silence that you use to contain the grace you receive when you enter the Castle of your soul. This quality of silence allows you to engage in discernment. You carry this silence within you, even when you are with others. It allows you to hold your center amid the chaos of your life; it keeps you clear so that you do not do or say things you will regret or make decisions out of fear.
We're being trained through our incarnations--trained to seek love, trained to seek light, trained to see the grace in suffering.
Before each meal, we can join our palms in mindfulness and think about the children who do not have enough to eat. Doing so will help us maintain mindfulness of our good fortune, and perhaps one day we will find ways to do something to help change the system of injustice that exists in the world. In many refugee families, before each meal, a child holds up his bowl of rice an says something like this: "Today, on the table, there are many delicious foods. I am grateful to be here with my family enjoying these wonderful dishes. I know there are many children less fortunate, who are very hungry." Being a refugee he knows, for example, that most Thai children never see the kind of fine rice grown in Thailand that he is about to eat. It is difficult to explain to children in the "overdeveloped" nations that not all children in the world have such beautiful and nourishing food. Awareness of this fact alone can help us overcome many of our own psychological pains. Eventually our contemplation can help us see how to assist those who need our help so much.
One of the startling prospects that Rumi and Shams bring to the world of mystical awareness, which turns out to be ordinary consciousness as well, is the suggestion that we "fall in love in such a way that it frees us from any connecting." what that means is that we become friendship. "When living itself becomes the Friend, lovers disappear." That is, a human being can become a field of love (compassion, generosity, playfulness), rather than being identified with any particular synapse of lover and beloved. The love-ache widens to a plain of longing at the core of everything: the absence-presence center of awareness. Rumi went in search of the missing Shams. The story is that he was on a street in Damascus when the realization came that he *was* their Friendship. No separation, no union, just he was that at the silent core. I'd have to say that's the *baraka* (a blessing, the particular grace of taking in presence), the mystery of the ecstatic life.
"I do not understand the mystery of grace--only that it meets us where we are, but does not leave us where it found us."
“If you seek the grace of God with your whole heart,
Then you may be assured that the grace of god
is also seeking you.”
Sri Ramana Maharshi
Since we remember that we are really all part of one great soul, we can see our beloved as ourselves, and know that we can give without end, without harm. And we know we can give everything. We can give not only our material possessions but our words, our bodies, our insights, our time, our money, our empathy, our listening, and our compassion.
My own parents, married forty-seven years, always called one another "Dearie".
"Dearie," one of them would call out. "What is it, Dearie?" the other would always respond, as if to say, Whatever you need, I will give it to you, whatever you ask, I will do it gladly. The antiphony of their "Dearies" was a sweet music that punctuated my young life. To me it meant that they saw one another as equal in spirit, and that in that great love they were always willing to serve one another. They called each other "Dearie" to their dying day.
Generosity is circle that returns unto itself. The more we give, the more we have. And in that state of generosity, willing spiritual sharing, we ourselves are healed. For when are generous, we can see the vast abundance that is also there for us. This is true generosity because no one is excluded. We are drawn together, united by it. Through it we have a taste of union. It grants us ease and gives us the grace of knowing that life is more than an endless struggle. Indeed it is gracious, generous, and kind.
“To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause within our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace.”
She was he and he was she. She was his masterpiece of light, the masterpiece with all its sheets of paper securely in place. She was his laugh and smile and serene face within the violent one, the freedom soaring in its imprisonment. She was one. She was all. She was the material embodiment of the boundless and limitless spiritual existence. She was divine, a divinity sharing itself, giving of itself, knowing itself. She was the cosmic swirls, was sweet innocence, was the softly spoken words of eternal and infinite revelations of creation, the womb of life. She was ignorance restored in all its abundant glory. Trinity was wisdom.
~ Chad Christopher Cobb, "The Sea of Milk" ~
The person who is a master in the art of living makes little distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their mind and their body, their education and their recreation, their love and their religion. They hardly know which is which. They simply pursue their vision of excellence and grace in whatever they do, leaving others to decide whether they are working or playing. To them, they are always doing both.
Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
And what You are is the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 1st-person perspective as the great I-I, the great Self, the Witness of this page, and this room, and this universe, and everything in it, witnessing it ALL with a passionate equanimity that leaves you alone as the Unmoved Mover. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 2nd-person perspective as the Great Thou, the Great Other, before whom you bow in an infinite act of complete release and savage surrender and ecstatic submission, and receive in return the entire Kosmos as your blessing and your forgiveness and your eternal grace. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal in its 3rd-person perspective as the Great Perfection, the Holy Spirit, the Great web of Life in all its infinite perfection and dynamic chaos, its pulsating pulsars and exploding nebulae, its stars and galaxies and planets and oceans, through which runs the common blood and bears the single heart of an Eros seeking its own higher wholeness, and always finding it, and seeking yet again, and always finding it yet once more, because You always know that You are here, don't You? And so in fun and sport and play and delight, and remorse and terror and agony and respite, You throw yourself out to start to play all over again, in this, the deepest part of You that gives birth to galaxies within Your heart, lets the stars light up as the neurons in Your brain, sing songs of love and delight to the submission and surrender of Your own good night, and all of this within the space that is You, the space that You feel as Your own I-I, or this ever-present Witness of the forms of Your own play.
And in the great I-I, as You witness the Forms of Your own play as the entire Kosmos - in that very moment, which is this timeless Now, a Now that has no beginning and no end, there is simultaneously Spirit in its 1-st person and 2nd=person and 3rd-person forms, the Great I and We and It feel each other, and in that unitary seamless sizzling Now, which is this very moment before you do anything at all, it is, quite simply over.
Which means, it has, quite simply, begun.
