Wordsworth, careful of the dignity of the senses, wrote that “pleasure is the tribute we owe to our dignity as human beings.” This is a profoundly spiritual perspective. Your senses link you intimately with the divine within you and around you. Attunement to the senses can limber up the stiffened belief and gentle the hardened outlook. It can warm and heal the atrophied feelings that are the barriers exiling us from ourselves and separating us from each other. Then we are no longer in exile from the wonderful harvest of divinity that is always secretly gathering within us.
This morning I watched how swiftly the colors of the clouds shifted at sunrise.The phenomenal world is in constant change. It is a challenge for us humans to live in that reality and work/play in the awareness of it. When we polarize situations– like and dislike, agree or disagree, we can at least watch what we are doing from a “third” vantage point. When we form an opinion and unconsciously stick to it, wearing our set of polarizing glasses, no matter what, we are closing our gateway to greater possibility. Our tiny, contracted identity is challenged when another perspective is offered. We are being given opportunities, repeatedly, to change– to align our minds with the wisdom of the heart. To accept everyone just as they are and not judge one another. We have the choice to truly listen to each other, and to eschew polarization and the denigration of ourselves and others (most obvious in the political arena). I wish us all well!
Convergence of Mississippi and Ohio Rivers at Cairo, IL (10.3.13)
I awoke this morning hearing the following: Allow yourself to be blessed and caressed by the world. Then fear will vanish and you will blossom as you.
(Brian and I were shocked by the devastation around Cairo, compounded by recent flooding. Despite that, we partook of the power of the convergence of these two great rivers. We also met two young men traveling the entire length of the river in a canoe. Sometimes the world seems bleak and even dangerous. Still, we can take a courageous stand and command its blessing.)
Wisdom consists in doing the next thing that you have to do. Doing it with your whole heart and finding delight in doing it. And the delight is the sense of the sacred.
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every [person], when [s]he gets quiet, when [s]he becomes desperately honest with him [or her]self, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
When we walk like (we are rushing), we print anxiety and sorrow on the earth. We have to walk in a way that we only print peace and serenity on the earth… Be aware of the contact between your feet and the earth. Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.
