Hi everyone,
I am working on a post about peace - but it is not ready yet and I don’t want to send it out until I get the words just right.
So, instead of a written piece today, I’d like to offer you the Fresh Platter practice from last week. I hope you enjoy it. For me, it has been a clarifying and stabilizing 13 minute experience that I have revisited multiple times since I recorded it last week.
Take care of yourself, we are deeper and stronger and more capable than we think…
Until next time,
Jess
“I want you to know how MEANINGFUL and HELPFUL your meditation (the platter and what flies onto it) has been and is to me. It has helped me go deeper and deeper, allowing clarity, insight, and probably healing. I am so grateful. I plan on continuing with this meditation often. In my opinion, it is brilliant and will no doubt help many, many people.
Another thing I have wanted to share…..how much your offerings (books, talks, meditations, newsletters) mean to me. Although you don’t know it, you and I go back several years, and you are very much a part of my life and my awareness/awakening. Listening to your meditations, reading your books, doing the work…..all have helped immensely in my own "alchemical process."
- Sandy
"The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what's coming; never. That's the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it's hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you'll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you'd have missed it if you'd given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone."
- Allen Wheelis
"We do not find our own center. It finds us. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking."
- Richard Rohr
Mercy
She asked me to kill the spider
Instead, I got the most
peaceful weapons I can find
I take a cup and a napkin.
I catch the spider, put it outside
and allow it to walk away
If I am ever caught in the wrong place
at the wrong place, just being alive
and not bothering anyone,
I hope I am greeted
with the same kind
of mercy.
- Nikki Giovani
"Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn't about turning your back on the world; it's about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.
The idea behind Nowhere - choosing to sit still long enough to turn inward - is at heart a simple one. If your car is broken, you don't try to find ways to repaint its chassis; most of our problems - and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind - lie within. To hurry around trying to find happiness outside ourselves makes about as much sense as the comical figure in the Sufi parable who, having lost a key in his living room, goes out into the street to look for it because there's more light there. As Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius reminded us more than two millennia ago, it's not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them; a hurricane sweeps through town, reducing everything to rubble, and one man sees it as a liberation, a chance to start anew, while another, perhaps even his brother, is traumatized for life. "There is nothing either good or bad," as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so."
-
So much of our lives takes place in our heads - in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation - that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it. As America's wisest psychologist, William James, reminded us, "The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." It's the perspective we choose - not the places we visit - that ultimately tells us where we stand."
- Pico Iyer
Just Thinking
Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.
Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot - peace, you know.
Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.
This is what the whole thing is about.
- William Stafford
What I like about the trees is how
They do not talk about the failure of their parents
And what I like about the grasses is that
They are not grasses in recovery
And what I like about the flowers is
That they are not flowers in need of empowerment or validation. They sway
Upon their thorny stems
As if whatever was about to happen next tonight
was sure to be completely interesting
- Tony Hoagland
"These are pregnant times throughout the world. Just as in geology we have breaking lines between huge blocks of earth, so today we are at the juncture between great blocks of time. This is the place of storm and volcano - and of becoming. In today's reality, a small act can have far-reaching consequences, beyond imagination, whereas things that will be done five or ten years from today will be so much less effective. This is precisely the meaning of pregnant times: Anything can be born. And this is exactly the time when one must not sleep."
- Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
“Since the universe is infinite, you are infinite. If you are infinite, you are everywhere. IF you are everywhere, then you can be aware of anything and influence anything by putting your attention on it. The key to this, then, is purity of intent and clarity of focus.”
Serge Kahili King