Blessed are you
who work with goodness
who stand for the right
who live in truth.
For you come to know the Friend
who dwells in the secret room
of your heart.
You are like an acorn planted
in fertile soil
that grows into a mighty oak.
Your work blesses others,
you radiate love;
joy delights your heart.
"My upside days are over, Greg Sahib," he said. "I'd like to work with you for many more years, but Allah, in his wisdom, has taken much of my strength. "
Mortenson hugged this may who'd helped him so often to find his way. Despite Mouzafer's talk of weakness, his arms were still strong enough to squeeze the breath out of a large American. "What will you do?" Mortenson asked.
"My work now," Mouzafer said simply, "is to give water to the trees."
That there is no separation between you and all that is good and true. Grace. A moment in thought where you are not alone, for you realize that you are part of a living, breathing creation. A moment where you understand that the unfolding of your life has meaning. Grace. The interturning of thought, intuition, and work to the highest possible good.
The greening spirit that is the shape of our sacred world is ever present, ever near to us. Our daily life can start to feel like a daily grind, causing us to forget this precious greening spirit of life. The Celtic Way banishes the heavy energies of a banal existence by sanctifying every moment with soul energy and purpose. Even the simplest tasks can be invested and imbued with sacred energy.
Service, gladly rendered, obligations squarely met, troubles well accepted or solved with God's help, the knowledge that at home or in the world we are partners in a common effort, the well understood fact that in God's light all human beings are important, the proof that love freely given surely brings a full return ... These are permanent and legitimate satisfactions of right living for which no amount of pomp and circumstance, no heap of material possessions, could possibly be substitutes.
True ambition is the deep desire to live usefully and to walk humbly under the grace of God.
I am not sitting, I am on a journey. Spiritually we are always on the move. We are on a journey through the inward spaces of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time into eternity.
The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination of your ignorance concerning yourself and life and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins with spiritual awakening. The "finding" of God is a coming to one's own Self.
If I set my heart upon another person, then I cannot live without that person. My heart becomes divided. If I give my heart to my life, on the other hand, if I give my heart to the journey with God, then my heart can be whole in a relationship with another. I can be heart and soul in the relationship because I am heart and soul in the journey of my life.
It's strange how much time people spend traveling round and round the circle of existence and getting nowhere. The real journey–the journey all people are required to take to achieve integration, self-realization and fulfillment–"eternal life"–is the journey inwards, the journey to the center of the soul.
I first thought of the spiritual journey as a linear path towards a distant goal. Gradually, I came to realize that the spiritual journey is a closed circle of love in which we slowly come closer to the center of ourself, which is always present. In this journey there is no "progress" but a shifting of consciousness that unveils our own essential nature, "the face we had before we were born. "As this spiral path unfolds, so our concepts of both ourself and the journey change, and we come to realize the deeper truth: that the traveler, the journey, and the goal are all one.
The serpentine path was the path of my life, a snakelike, meandering path, winding in and out, up and down. The antithesis of the "straight and narrow." A path that does not ever "come to a point." Two steps left, two steps right. Into the darkness, into the light. Not a goal, but the journey... . I did not know who or what might be ahead on the serpentine path, but I felt a sense of eagerness and anticipation. The dance is about to begin. The dance of my life. It begins anew every day.
I am being driven forward
Into an unknown lane.
The pass grows steeper,
The air colder and sharper.
A wind from my unknown goal
Stirs the strings of expectation.
Still the question:
Shall I ever get there?
There where life resounds,
A clear pure note
in the silence.
I see the way of the artist as a kind of pilgrimage. When you go on a pilgrimage, you set out from where you happen to be and start walking toward a place of great sanctity in the hope of returning from it renewed, enriched, and sanctified. However far you may walk, every pilgrimage is a safari into your own dark interior, an inner journey. For pilgrimages belong to the inner world, to the realm called the "religious."
A journey may feel as if it sweeps towards the skyline, but the sound it makes is always within yourself. The seat of transformation is within.
When changewinds swirl through our lives, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey: that of confronting the lost and counterfeit places within us and releasing our deeper, innermost self–our true selves. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are.
In being true to the small voice within, you are being of service to others and to the world in the most profound way possible. You cannot know where that voice will take you, but in being willing "to save the only life you could save," you are affirming one of the deepest and most sobering truths of all: no one else can ever walk your journey for you. You alone can respond to your call.
We journey together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and the love we give our fragile craft.
The spiritual journey is a story of a return to our heart, the very center of our being, that has been obscured by our driving compulsion to create our own identify.
If you wish to meet the Beloved, go as far as your own heart.
The greatest journeys are made because of the call of the heart.
We all belong in the heart of God. We belong in God; that is where our heart has its home. In God's heart we always find what we need: attentiveness, the responsiveness, the safe haven for our vulnerable selves. We all belong in the heart of God.
We all belong to God, not as a possession to be grasped, but as a partner in a loving union in which we become free and vibrantly alive. We all belong in the heart of God. Everyone belongs, for we journey together and we are who we are by virtue of our belonging to one another.
I believe that life is about finding the beauty inside oneself, and offering it to the world. I want to live a simple life of integrity and beauty; to live and work from the stillpoint, from the silence. I seek peace with myself, I want to be a person of thought rather than words. More than anything else, I am being asked to walk with slowness, thoughtfulness. Slowness invites an awareness of beauty.
The world is a mirror of infinite beauty,
yet no one sees it.
It is a Temple of majesty,
yet no one regards it.
It is a region of Light and Peace,
did not humans disquiet it.
It is the Paradise of God,
the place of Angels,
and the Gate of Heaven.
One of my mother's most amazing characteristics is the way she has always valued and created beauty, even at a time in her life when such valuing seemed to threaten survival. In this, I know my mother to be the image of God. Not only has God created all things beautiful from nothing; this is no more than we would expect. In those country barns, my mother recognized broken pieces of furniture for what they were and she paid for their re-creation by going hungry. In the same way, God as our mother recognizes the beauty within all the broken and discarded parts of ourselves ...
Exiled on earth as we are, unless we are able to content ourselves with that shadow of Paradise that is Virgin Nature, we must create for ourselves surroundings which, by their truth and their beauty recall our heavenly origin and thereby also awaken our hope.
Beauty lies at the heart of the tea ceremony. Each object used must be beautiful. Special cups are made for this ceremony. Even to look on these cups is to be brought into a wider, calmer realm of the self.
The tea master Okakura KaKuzo has said that beauty evokes harmony and the mystery of mutual charity... . All that we call beautiful is a kind of vessel, like love, that holds what we know.
Who can afford to live without beauty?
Beauty fills us with passion;
it graces us with joy and lights up our existence.
A landscape, a piece of music, a film, a dance –
suddenly all dreariness is gone,
we are left bewitched and dazzled.
If we get lost in dark despair,
beauty takes us back to Center.
A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
BEAUTY: bountiful blessings of the Beloved ...
praise, humility, gratitude,
our response.
Beauty is before me
And beauty is behind me
Above and below me hovers the beautiful
I am surrounded by it
I am immersed in it
In my youth I am aware of it
And in old age I shall walk quietly
The beautiful trail.
Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty
and respect for strength – in search of my
mother's garden, I found my own.
Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their innermost being, their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves.
Beauty is a celebration of is-ness... Beauty is felt in the now, with no if-only's or should-be's or someday-it-might-be's.
To the medieval thinker beauty was not a value independent of others, but rather the radiance of truth, the splendor of ontological perfection, and that quality of things which reflects their origin in God. Light and luminous objects, no less than musical consonance, conveyed an insight into the perfection of the cosmos, and a divination of the Creator.
Perhaps it seems surprising that physicists seek beauty, but in fact they have no choice. As yet there has not been an exception to the rule that the demonstrable solution to any problem will turn out to be an aesthetic solution.
Composers know how to use harmony and melody like a net to catch beauty's colors and radiance. And when we like what we hear, we open our pores to take in more – just as we close them against what seems ugly or offensive. Isn't that why we remember so vividly the hours or days spent in places we love, perhaps in the mountains or by the sea, where all our senses were awake?
Where is beauty located? Everywhere we recognize it: the pattern is in us. Beauty is the name we give our response to the perfection we sense around us, and within us.
The divine and flaming Word shines in the world in the silence of the soul and "moves" it. This movement is living faith and its light is hope or illumination, while all springs from the Divine Fire which is Love or union with God.
We naturally use our faith to strengthen our relationship with God, to focus our thoughts on what is good, to help us love our neighbor. I ask a lot from my faith. To me, it's not simply a place of comfort; it is a reference point from which I take the indecipherable events of my world and place them in a context that is holy, sacred, and dynamic. It won't make the world go away, but it does have the power to shape one into a person of deep sensitivity and true passion.
O faith, untainted and immortal,
Thou art a stream miraculous;
To heaven's home, Thou art the portal,
The dawn of future life for us.
O lamp of faith, within one burning,
Burn brighter, let none smother Thee,
Be Thou my guide as I am learning,
On paths of life, enlighten me.
Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the
power of reason to believe.
My faith was tested. I was my own guinea pig; the years in isolation due to illness were passed in prayer and study of all kinds–like Job on his dunghill. I was to learn that health is also having FAITH in the higher aspects of human nature. Health is having hope, because without hope there is no life. Health is love of our selves and others. In truth, love is the life blood of faith and hope and together they create a healthy body, mind, and spirit: the Trinity of our being.
In terms of faith, it's the story (and not the facts) that grips the imagination, impregnates the heart, and animates the spirit
within bringing meaning and integration into one's experience.
Whatever-come-along faith is like leaves
blowing in the winds, while
Giving one's power to worldly authority
is faith denied, a soul devoid of freedom.
Awakened faith lives by the Law written on each heart,
that hears and heeds the Voice of Silence.
One's own unique and authentic faith
becomes expressed with utter integrity in action.
Aspire to know the Truth that awakens
in the heart, the Truth that sets you free.
Without faith that it is possible to render reality understandable by means of our theoretical constructs, without faith in an inner harmony of the world, there could be no science. This faith is and always will be the basic motivation behind every creative scientific idea. All our endeavors, all the dramatic conflicts between old and new ideas are supported by the eternal desire for knowledge, the unshakeable faith in cosmic harmony which becomes stronger the more difficulties loom before us.
Into my life You came like a storm of monsoon
banging down from the eastern sky.
And You scattered me, like the wind disperses
dry grass and the petals of flowers.
Out of myself You scattered me into Nothingness,
Beyond the Nowhere, beyond the Beyond.
A true artist directs readers back to themselves, helps them to discover within their inexhaustible riches. No one can be saved or cured other than through their own efforts. The remedy is Faith.