If we know how to take refuge in Mother Earth, we can experience healing through sitting, walking, or simply by breathing. We can feel her solidity under our feet; we can see her majesty in high mountain peaks and lakes, in the vast blue sky, winding rivers, and deep oceans. If we truly believe in the planet’s power to heal herself, we know she can also heal us. We don’t have to do anything at all. Just surrender ourselves to Mother Earth and she will do everything for us. We are the Earth. The Earth is us. We can allow this  process to happen by itself.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

Ideals are like stars: You will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

–Carl Schurz

This is artificial because you’re bringing cause and effect into a region where it doesn’t work. It is true that the feeling “accept” is associated with Conscience, and you say, “If I work on this, will this help Conscience to develop?” It sounds very sensible, but it misses the point. This is difficult for people to grasp, because they expect to see results arising from causes in this spiritual life, but it doesn’t work in that way. When we spoke about causality last week, we said that causality is the lowest of all the forces that work in the world. Always try to remember this. In the spiritual world it is the unpredictable, the unexpected that happens. It is the realm of freedom. It is spontaneity. If you try to import into it cause and effect—doing things in order to get some result—you’re keeping yourself away from that world.

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bounds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.

–Patanjali

(Thanks to Hannah Popish)

To surrender, to transform, to become – from our Soul centres – we allow the rich, dark, gestational world of the Dream Lodge to work on us, to work in us, in whatever way and in whatever time is needed for transformation to take place. We allow new pathways and new frequencies for messages to come in.

As the need for doing and accomplishing external goals fades into the background, I allow myself to sink deeper into the fallow season – pulling me, lowering me, cradling me in a place where I can receive those messages without distraction. Sometimes, I recognize the voice that carries them – they are the words of my own truth, gradually forming in my throat.

In winter’s depths is kindled

True spirit life with glowing warmth;

It gives to world appearance,

Through forces of the heart, the power to be.

Grown strong, the human soul defies

With inner fire the coldness of the world.

–Rudolf Steiner