As artists, we are scouts of consciousness, trailblazers for community and culture.

–Julia Cameron

Feeling and feeling and sinking into this very body, into the bones and flesh of Mother Earth, not holding myself apart from her– her mountains, her streams, her springs, or from the moon and sun who dance around her dutifully; this is coming home and this is why I do my art. My artwork is despatcho, an offering to the living land.

As I allow my connectedness to Mother Earth to amplify, I merge with Her and am guided subtly; as the Queros say, I come into ayni.

So every time you have an ‪#‎energy‬ that needs to be transformed, like jealousy or fear, do something to care for this energy, if you do not want this energy to destroy you. Touch the seed of ‪#‎mindfulness‬, and all of its energy will be able to establish itself in your “living room,” like a mother tenderly embracing your pain. With that energy of mindfulness, you are doing the true practice of ‪#‎meditation‬ with regard to your pain, Your emotions. If you are able to maintain mindfulness for five or ten minutos, you will experience some relief right away.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh.

Thanks to Gabriela Rocha-Caballero

Landscape

For a countryman the living landscape is
a map of kinship at one level,
at another, just below this, a chart of use,
never at any level a fine view:
sky is a handbook of labour or idleness;
wind in one airt is the lapping of hay,
in another a long day at turf on the moss;
landscape is families, and a lone man
boiling a small pot, and letters once a year;
it is also, underpinning this, good corn
and summer grazing for sheep free of scab
and fallow acres waiting for the lint.
So talk of weather is also talk of life,
and life is man and place and these have names.

• From The Selected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Michael Longley & Frank Ormsby (Blackstaff Press, 2007), reproduced by permission of Blackstaff Press on behalf of the Estate of John Hewitt. Landscape also appeared in Collected Poems 1932-1967 (1968).

Embrace the full essence of your soul by staying present in all actions.
The sun rises everyday in renewal. No matter what catastrophe has occurred in the day before, the sun emerges victorious on the horizon creating a new day. Stay in the sunrise. Embrace the fresh canvas.
Dwelling in the past or worrying about the future is a vicious circle of activity that does nothing but distract you from your higher perspective.
Be timeless. Be soulful. Stay in your present. It’s really the best participation.

-VERONICA

Thanks to Kelly Russell for this quote.

THE WORLD FLOWS THROUGH YOU

A renewal, indeed a complete transfiguration of your life, can come through attention to your senses. Your senses are the guides to take you deep into the inner world of your heart. The greatest philosophers admit that to a large degree all knowledge comes through the senses. The sense are our bridges to the world. Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores which let the world in. Through attunement to the wisdom of your senses, you will never become an exile in your own life, an outsider lost in an external spiritual place which your will and intellect have constructed.

~~ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

I don’t think of life as a sum of choices. I think of outcomes as a result of each choice. I’m not sure that so called “choices” would have been as wise as what actually happened. We fool ourselves to think that we are making big choices that are going to direct our lives. What’s actually happening is that in every moment small, intimate choices present themselves, depending on conditions that previously arose. And appropriate responses can happen if we’re present. Those appropriate responses come together to be part of a kaleidoscopic pattern that can later on appear to be a huge choice that we made. Actually, the pattern is always changing, and if we look at it with spaciousness, it’s beautiful.

When the gaze of African elders fell on a turbulent distance, they rallied their people by urging them to slow down. I have often quoted them in my talks by saying, ‘the times are urgent, let us slow down’. It is perhaps crucial to note that ‘slowing down’ isn’t so much a function of speed, as it is a function of awareness. The point with ‘slowing down’ (and why this is important in our times) is taking the less obvious path – and not merely about reducing how fast we do the things we do (though this is often implied). Slowing down invites us into a keen awareness of alliances, of affinities and agencies that press so close to us that it might be said that we share the same skin. Slowing down is, more importantly, a repudiation of the idea that ‘we’ have agency – or that anyone is invested with agency, will or foresight. It is a worrying of the boundaries of ‘we’ – a stretching of what it means. It is the acknowledgement that agency is always an entanglement with forces beyond our wildest reckoning, and it is when we divest ourselves of the hubris of sole intentionality that we access ‘resources’ stronger than volition, nobler than ideology, and finer than outcomes.

The True Self is the seer,
observing all that can be known,
and all that remains unknowable…
the visible and invisible worlds.

— Alberto Villoldo