Dear Friends ~ Each spring the seeds stir and push up tender shoots through the warming soil; buds swell, lining the tree limbs like tiny jewels. All around there are signs that the Earth is renewing herself, that the Holy relationship of loving reciprocity endures. This is more than reassuring, because by now we must see that we are witnessing the unraveling of the sustaining systems of a myriad of worlds and realms. How shall we make sense of this? Old stories may help. When the Old Woman in the Cave returned to weaving the garment of the world after stirring the stew that sustained the seeds of spring, she found that her painstaking work had come apart and lay in a mess on the cave's floor. She sat within the womb of that holy cave and beheld the utterly tangled strands in deep Silence. For how long the story doesn't say. Only then, out of deep Silence and contemplation, did her hands begin to find the threads in the chaos to weave the unknown world to come. In these uneasy times, when all that we have known and love is fraying, we are invited into that cave and into that moment of Silence, that broad edge of hearts cracked open, that long in-breath. Indeed, as friends and practitioners of Silence, it may be precisely what we are given to do in this time. ~ Lindsay
We always think our negative emotions are produced by the fault of other people or by the fault of circumstances. We always think that. Our negative emotions are in ourselves and are produced by ourselves. There is absolutely not a single unavoidable reason why somebody else's action or some circumstance should produce a negative emotion in me. It is only my weakness. No negative emotion can be produced by external causes if we do not want it. We have negative emotions because we permit them, justify them, explain them by external causes, and in this way we do not struggle with them.