We are made of time.
We are its feet and its voice.
The feet of time walk in our shoes.
Sooner or later, we all know,
the winds of time will close the tracks.
Passage of nothing, steps of no one.
The voice of time tells of the voyage.
Let us become attuned to that Transcendental Being imparted to all things by divine action. It deserves our attention, and those who heed it with an open heart and with confidence and courage need not fear. For divine action has always been the source from which flows a torrent of grace which spreads over everything. Our lives flow unceasingly in that unknown deep where all that is necessary is to love and to accept the present moment as the best, with perfect trust in God's universal goodness.
I resolve to live with all my might while I do live. I resolve never to lose one moment of time and to improve my use of time in the most profitable way I possibly can. I resolve never to do anything I wouldn't do if it were the last hour of my life.
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light, you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.
May we live in today
and never in the future
or the past,
or come too late
to those we love.
The present in which all times
are included, is one:
a unity in itself.
One of the greatest mysteries in life is the mystery of time. Everything that happens to us, happens to us in and through time. Time is the force that brings every new experience to the door of your heart. All that happens to you is controlled and determined by time. Time opens up and opens out the mystery of the soul.
How you slice up your time also reflects how you identify yourself.
Memory is the repository of the past, which is where most of our living takes place. We have divided life into past, present, and future, and this division, like all of our divisions, removes us from the fullness of living, from the mysterious unknown and unknowable movement of life that is the source of all beauty. The past exists only in memory, and the future is merely a projection of past memories. Now, this moment, is all there is.
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She went out one day
in a relative way,
And returned the previous night.
The more sand that has escaped from the
hourglass of life, the clearer we should
see through it.
We were breaking an unspoken social rule. We were talking about God and religion at a time when the stakes were high, when turmoil and confusion were the order of the day. We were harried, busy mothers, but at our meetings we found ourselves released from Time, suspended from the reality of the outside world. ... Our relationship was turning into something sacred, something we began to call our Faith Club.
In the realm of timelessness we discover God. If we have ever become aware of the moment when we understood something, we must have realized the extratemporal nature of the event. Extemporaneous means outside of time. Indeed, the gift of making extemporaneous comments hinges on our receptivity to inspired wisdom, reaching our consciousness from the realm of the timeless.
When time is a friend, you relish how it works. You know that your purpose is within you and that eventually time will unfold a dream, an integrating vision for your life purpose. ... My future is behind me. I can't see it, while I can see my past which runs out in front of me.
He was still and gazed deeply into the infinite pool that bears stars into being. Above him was a tiny smudge of light that was the closest galaxy. It was spinning, spinning, but so far away that one could look for a whole lifetime and not see it alter. The galaxies out there whirled into each other like discs, blinding into space without colliding--passing through each other at thousands of miles per second, yet they did not appear to move.
Suddenly he understood: Time is an illusion of the mind. Only love remains.
There is a pressing need for something to be made known, for the secrets of the heart to be made public, for the music of the soul to be played. For centuries lovers of God have held the secrets of Divine Love within their own hearts, shared only with a few. But this knowledge needs to be made public, the song of Love's oneness to be heard. If the music of Divine Love is not played in the marketplaces, life will lose its meaning, and the collective despair of the soul will be too terrible to imagine.
The music flows within me like pure spirit.
What a wonderful conversation
within the flow of universal energy!
Eloquence needs no words --
I know this from intimacy with the divine.
O Great One, I give thanks for this
and for all music --
A power line fed into my heart from
the universal grid.
I heard the first measures of music and was thinking how lovely it was to be in this small church in a distant land. Then a solo voice took over the room, filling everything with its power, and my next breath came with difficulty. I have never, anywhere, heard a human voice so Pure, a sound so penetrating: outside of me, then suddenly inside of me, tearing down resistances I didn't even know I had ... its love so piercing that everyone began to weep involuntarily. When I opened my eyes nothing prepared me for what I saw. The young voice was coming from eighty-three-year-old Jonas, who was singing the "Sanctus," by Beethoven, with a beauty that could not be explained. It was like the Soul of all life summoning each spirit who listened.
Music was bestowed on humankind for the sake of effecting harmonious revolutions of the soul within us whenever its rhythmic motions are disturbed. Thus when the soul has lost its harmony, melody, and rhythm, music assists in restoring it to order and concord.
I once heard the pianist, Arthur Rubinstein, being interviewed. At one point he was asked to share his experience of playing Chopin's Nocturnes. He said in effect, "I do not know what it is. But over and over again I have had the experience of sitting in a crowded concert hall playing the Nocturnes and I can feel everyone in the room waiting for the next note." In this moment of waiting, all present find their contemplative community in their oneness with one another in the boundless mystery that enraptures them.
You wouldn't think
It would be so easy
To forget
Who we really are
Or that death is always at our shoulder
Or that everything is alive
Or that God is everywhere singing.
There is a certain relevance to life
that is hard to hear in the business of the day.
The past and future come pounding on my brain.
It is in the time I spend alone with God
that I tune my soul to the music of the dance.
I can begin to hear the song
in the most wondrous places,
in the most unexpected circumstances.
I am called to the rhythm
and even if no one else has ears,
I enter in the song.
Within this body
The Eternal keeps singing
And Its spring goes on and on flowing.
Consider learning how to sing or play a musical instrument, not for professional reasons but as a way to interact with the angels and to enjoy sound. Recently, I started playing my flute again. When I sit outside and play my flute it is exhilarating . I treasure these moments where I can return to the heaven-sent birds even the most meager reflection of the beautiful music they offer me throughout the year.
We who love music of any type share one thing in common. Music touches us intellectually and emotionally. We love the notes, the rhythm, the percussion--the sound. It stirs us where we live. It speaks to us. ... Maybe our styles of faith differ from one another, but there is one binding love, this one celestial music that supersedes our differences and joins us at our hearts, into God. Loving music of any type makes us similar. Our problem is that we tend to note the differences, not the similarities.
Next I saw the most lucid air, in which I heard in a marvelous way many kinds of musicians praising the joys of the heavenly citizens. ... And their sound was like the voice of a multitude, making music in harmony.
I find it impossible to doubt music while actually playing it. Even as the rest of my life seems overpopulated with questions and uncertainties about why one thing should be done instead of another, in the midst of the playing, dancing around silence and space with the presence of notes, the music always seems to matter. I still want to reach for those notes that must be played, that are right because they are essential melodies, unavoidable tones, songs that cannot be defied. This music is silent even when it sings because it does not speak--it cannot be reduced by explanation.
It is a sweet thing, friendship, a dear balm,
a happy and auspicious bird of calm.
Ideally, friendships lead us into deeper communion with each other; those we love mirror the divine reality and so draw us closer to the One they reflect. In our humanness, however, we can forget that the friend is only a reflection of God and instead invest ultimate meaning in the relationship.
A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.
God acts upon us inescapably through the people
who befriend, touch and influence our lives.
Silence is the property, the contemplative quality, the fruit of faith. Interior, mystical silence is a silence which stems from the intensity of loving faith ... the interior result of a heart that loves intensely. The presence in our hearts of a secret to be kept brings about a density which is interior silence. Communication of secrets is the sign which manifests and proves the friendship and total trust of a friend.
Thou hast made me known to friends
whom I knew not;
Thou hast given me seats in homes
not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and
made brothers and sisters of strangers.
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibility not born until they arrive, and it is
only by this meeting a new world is born
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song--
The song from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
My friends have made the story of my life.
In a thousand ways they have turned all my
limitations into beautiful privileges and enabled
me to walk serene and happy in the shadow
cast by my deprivation.
Friends have been defined as people who know you at your worst and like you anyway, people in whose company you can be yourself. But perhaps more than anything else, friends are people who care about you for who you are, not what you can do for them. There is a kind of holiness in true friendship, because it makes sure that we are never alone when we desperately need to not be alone.
"You don't need a big sister," Lulu said, "you need a friend. I'd much rather be that."
"Okay," Emily muttered shyly. "Only I don't know why. I'm just a kid."
"You know things most adults don't even think of. You care about the same things I do. That's a lot of what a friend really is. And you're strong. I've needed that. And you share your world, and you don't judge it. Those are very grown-up things; and Emily, I can't name one of my so-called friends who have them all."
If you maintain a feeling of compassion, loving kindness, then something automatically opens your inner door. Through that, you can communicate more easily with other people. And that feeling of warmth creates a kind of openness. You'll find that all human beings are just like you, so you'll be able to relate to them more easily. That gives you a spirit of friendship.
I asked the old couple what secrets they could tell me about living long and well. At first they looked at each other and laughed, then he declared,
"Things are as they are. I know my wife and she knows me. We don't hide from each other. We don't ask each other lots of questions, we aren't anxious, running around all the time. Everything is open between us. We say our prayers and do our work. Most of the day I am outside, and she is inside, and when we unite, we enjoy our company, thanks be to God."
The Mikmaq on the Atlantic coast have no sound for Nature. They have "space" or "place of creation" ... they have cultural literacy with the ecosystem ... every aspect of nature to Mikmaqs is Spirit. They live in harmony with this intelligible essence. The Mikmaq can perceive the web.
I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heavens,
The glorius sun's lifegiving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind's tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea
Around the old eternal rocks.
Nature soothes, heals, and teaches with her silence.