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

The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused.

~ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

The Storm

Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better

-Mary Oliver

This morning the thought came to me of “being immersed in the world.” I was given the palpable feeling of what this is. To be saturated with the substance of the entire world, to be of the substance of all things. Later… I came upon the above poem on Facebook!

It is what I need for my soul’s growth, and also for the story work I am doing now. I am working on re-entering THE SNOW MAIDEN, so I can share it at the Anchorage Folk Festival.

This morning I woke up with the thought that it is possible to choose happiness and not impose any external condition upon our experiencing it. Happiness is most easily experienced when something we like happens to us. Is isn’t so easy to choose happiness regardless of our reactions to external circumstances and internal thought patterns. (I am not speaking about depression and other forms of mental illness here.)

I see in myself a recurring sense of dread when I anticipate having to do something that I am afraid I will not be able to accomplish. I am getting tired of having this happen to me. I don’t deny it, but rather, I wrap my Self around it and hold it from a place deeper within, the place I have found through performing meditative practices.

When I do this I have compassion for all humans and animals, for the suffering endured. I hope and believe more of us will have the opportunity to transcend suffering as we access that place within ourselves that is perpetually blissful.

Allow a place for the trickster in your life.
Otherwise it gets too boring. Leave the back door open, because he (or she) never enters through the front door, and we never know when. If he visits you, lock your reasonable thoughts in a room, and if they don’t cooperate, give them a toy to play with. Have a good meal with the trickster and allow yourself to laugh. Enjoy the new perspective he brings as a gift, while everybody else is discussing reasons for foiled plans. The trickster is a messenger from the soul; he (or she) sometimes tries to visit us, but we don’t always welcome them, and sometimes, getting stuck in old patterns, we prefer to become bitter or moralizing. It makes a great difference how we respond.
-The Sacred Feminine for Life

One Today

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper—
bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives—
to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches 2
as mothers watch children slide into the day.

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind—our breath. Breathe. Hear it
through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
or whispers across café tables, Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello| shalom,
buon giorno |howdy |namaste |or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me—in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives
without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.

One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound 3
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.

One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn’t give what you wanted.

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together

— Richard Blanco

Full text via Presidential Inauguration Committee

The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time.

~ John O’Donohue

Introduction to the 1995 Edition

Vision: A Personal Call to Create a New World by Ken Carey

With the acquisition of language, a vast range of perception is disregarded. A child soon comes to believe that if there is no word for something it does not exist. Sensory input that is not reinforced is deemphasized, until eventually the child accepts the cultural viewpoint, with all of its biases and underlying assumptions. In the process something valuable is lost.

The benefits of language are obvious. Without it, each new generation would repeat the mistakes and forego the learning of the past. Without it, our race could not advance. But the view of ourselves and our world that comes to us through language is but a thin sliver of the multidimensional reality we inhabit.

This larger reality has fascinated me since childhood. I have never been without at least some minimal awareness of it, and through the years there were always those odd moments when my mind would relax into a form of perception that brought me fully into its strange and curious domain. Often, this perception would come forward to help me establish with a plant or an animal a rapport deeper than what I found possible when viewing things from a cultural perspective. Although my language-oriented mind would later remember that these incidents occurred, since my experiences were nonverbal I rarely remembered much of their contents or detail.

It was not until one day in the winter of 1978 that I made my first attempt to verbalize what I experienced one of these states. In bed with a cold and fever, my thoughts had drifted into a calm, meditative silence. Passing moments pooled together, relaxing into one. Distinctions between inside and outside began to dissolve. On a level beyond words, beyond the surface froth of passing events, on a level deep in the ocean of being, I experienced myself as energy, and my body as an intertwining of sun and soil.

Was this the awareness of the newborn and very young? Everything that touched my senses, every nuance of sound and light, every object in the room felt as intimate to me as the lungs through which I breathed, as inseparable, as personal. Insights did not come In flashes, but as things I had always known, truths so obvious it was hard to believe I had forgotten them. But I had… and might again. Could this awareness be expressed, articulated, recorded in words?

Language only liimits perception when its terms are taken too seriously. Taken lightly, the attempt to find words to record our impressions can help us to perceive more fully. Verbalizing this awareness would challenge me to clarify the experience of it. Yet its very nature seemed to defy definition. To translate it into symbolic characters on sheets of paper would be like trying to channel a river through an hourglass. The very impossibility of the task intrigued me. I put a new ribbon in the typewriter. (He goes on to speak of the writing of a series of books.)

(This leads me to reflect on my experiences of listening to and telling stories over the years. My storytelling mentor Laura Simms is articulate about the “story beneath the story” that can occur. I believe that storytelling can allow us to enter forgotten chambers within us, and that we can experience things individually and collectively that we have “forgotten.”)

– Pamela Ann McDowell Saylor

I walk slowly, but I never walk backward.

— Abraham Lincoln

In my search to see reality in myself, I may come to the door of perception. But it will not open, truth will not be revealed, so long as I cling to what I know. I need to have empty hands to approach the unknown.

Jeanne de Salzmann