Zalman Schachter-Shalomi told a group that there was a magic song the Baal Shem Tov once taught his students, saying if they sang it after his death, he himself would be there among them.
A listener asked Zalman, “So, what is the song?”
“Ah,” he had to confess, “I don’t know the actual words or tune.”
“Oy,” lamented his questioner, “Such a good gun and no bullets!”
[B]lessing is at the heart of any spiritual practice. For ultimately all such practices are about remembrance, connectedness, wholeness, and being a participant in the flow of love that weaves the world together from the most numinous to the most material…. Spiritual practices are about how we give of ourselves, sharing our life, our presence, and our substance so that the body of creation may be seamless and the infinite may be reflected in the presence of the finite. —David Spangler, Blessing
W. Brugh Joy, MD used to close his emails and letters with the salutation, “A Radiance of Blessings!” With this, he signaled both the solar and shared nature of blessing as an activity. It sheds warmth and light, and it is interpersonal. A radiance.
Sometimes we turn away from a glance, a look. Sometimes we take the risk of seeing and being seen.
When are we?
And when does he turn
the Earth and the stars
toward our being?
—Rilke, Sonnet I,3
What is your most agonizing experience? If drinking is bitter to you, become the wine.
There are so many ways to feel separate. From each other, from the Earth, from "what's going on in politics," from the spirit. It was Rudolf Steiner's key, early insight that the longed-for re-integration of human and world is already present in our every act of understanding. In the instant of understanding itself, we are not separate from what we understand. This unity of self and meaning can be extended to any kind of meaning and any kind of meaning-maker. All sincere dialogue is metamorphosis.
"Can we be more in love with the Earth?" This is one of David Spangler's provocative questions. And he personally answers YES. Rilke does too, and he wants to show us, very intimately, how.
Each week, we touch on the previous week’s meditation theme, just briefly, to help orient us. There is a sense of continuity that can grow from remembering where we were, and continuing on from there. A silent aspect to each of us never forgets anything meaningful. It stands behind the daily threshings and thrashings of our lives, and sifts the gleanings. By bringing our prior meditation to mind, we can remember ourselves as this careful onlooker. Then we’re ready.
If you are receiving this as a forwarded email and wish you could get these emails directly, your wish can come true. Just write to me: michael@findingly.net and I will add you to the email list.
And may all your wishes come true.
Badgers have more photoreceptive rods in their retinas than we do, and they have a reflective layer in their eyes, called a tapetum, that makes their eyes shine in car headlights and that bounces uncollected photons back into the retina. Badgers squeeze more light from their world into their brains than we do. The world gives them the same; they do more with it.
—from Charles Foster, Being a Beast
I had a GPS system that used to say, as its final command for a given trip, “Arrive at your destination!” The car would have stopped, so I was already there, but it still commanded me to arrive. What is it to stop striving and receive the accomplishment of one’s destination?
And why do we care about the dead?
Well, why care about the living?
We are stronger together: that’s one reason.
— Rilke
To be silent. Whoever's more deeply silent… — Rilke
Listen to the hummingbird
Whose wings you cannot see
Listen to the hummingbird
Don’t listen to me.
— Leonard Cohen
If you only had one prayer to say, and that prayer were “Thank You,” it would be enough for a lifetime. — Meister Eckhart
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jack Engler said, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody." You need to have a solid ego, that is, well-rooted in the world, before you can dissolve into the totality.
