When you do things from your soul, a river moves through you,
Freshness and a deep joy are the signs.~Rumi♥

There is indeed a relationship between the outer universe and the inner life of the soul.

— Adam Bittleson, Our Spiritual Companions

~ Here and Now..
I evoke the elemental force of Water,
the fluid of infinite shapes and forms.
Flowing source of adaptability, emotion and life.
I seek the pure spring within, that I may
drink deep of change, relationship, nourishment and grace.
I call you forth to wash away all that needlessly binds,
and to move fluidly in this world.
Ocean and River, Ripple and Rain,
Water… I call thee hence. ~~

Art as a healing form, or practice: “Healing comes out of the practice itself when it is engaged in as a way of being. From the perspective of mindfulness, you are already whole, so what is the point of trying to become what you already are? What is required above all is that we let go into the domain of being. That is what is fundamentally healing.”

–Jon Kabat-Zinn

Unfinished Poem

I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.

~ John O’Donohue

When we acknowledge the wild beauty of God, we begin to glimpse the potential holiness of our neglected wildness. As humans, citizens and believers, we have become domesticated beyond belief. We have fallen out of rhythm with our natural wildness. What we now call ‘being wild’ is often misshapen, destructive and violent. The natural wildness as the fluency of the soul at one with beauty is foreign to us.

The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul, the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency and the consolation of the lonesome that is not lonely. Our fear of our own wildness derives in part from our fear of the formless; but the wild is not the formless – it holds immense refinement and, indeed, clarity. The wild has a profound simplicity that carries none of the false burdens of brokenness or self-conflict; it flows naturally as one, elegant and seamless.

~ John O’Donohue

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

~ Mary Oliver

To deliver oneself up,
to hand oneself over,
entrust oneself completely to the silence
of a wide landscape of woods and hills,
or sea and desert; to sit still while
the sun comes up over the land
and fills its silences with light.

…few are willing to belong completely
to such silence, to let it soak into their bones,
to breathe nothing but silence, to feed
on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life
into a living and vigilant silence.

~ Thomas Merton
from Thoughts in Solitude

“Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand–relax.  If you relax, it comes.  If you relax, it is there.  If you relax, you start vibrating with it.”  ~ Osho

Come stand over here, just a step or two beyond the place you have occupied for so long, where you have worn the earth smooth with your pacing, where you have spent so many hours fighting the problem you cannot seem to solve. Take a break. Catch your breath. Come stand here, where you can catch a freshening breeze and see far into the valley below. Let the distant clouds carry your worry for a while, see how the sun empties the world of shadow. The answer you seek may be just a step beyond, a higher place where the view is clear of all obstructions.

— Steven Charleston