Proper study . . .
It's Freya's day . . . and the mailbox continues to receive echoes from Valentine's day . . .
For the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, religion isn’t primarily what you think, or even the actions you perform. It is what you desire...Knowing the Great Mystery—discerning the will of creation—is, for Rumi, more like falling in love than like receiving instruction from a written text. — Richard Rohr
The prolific author Henry Adams was born on this date in 1838 Boston.
"The proper study of mankind is woman." – Henry Adams, in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, first published in 1904.
We've been told “the Garden of Eden” was a one-off, but it remains just under our feet. We don't need a grand spiritual awakening to come to us from a sky-God alter in order to come back into this Edenic consciousness. We just need to pay close attention to the connections that already constitute us. The lush, environmental contexts that shape our desires and our stories teaching us, as did the Stone Age Dionysus, how to send down our roots. – Sophie Strand, in The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. Simon and Schuster, 2022.
Gifts From The Way
Staying true to The Way, what were once forks in the road
become rather gates that open welcoming your arrival.
In the morning, wise children bring you bread
and taking you by the hand
lead on a path to a clear pond
beyond which the next part of your journey begins.
– jab
Starlight in the Afternoon
It's Thor's day … Northerlies have returned to the Northeast corner of Okieland for one last cooling off before Spring really springs. In anticipation, the mailbox this morning held musical notes.
In every significant field of human understanding—religion, medicine, law, history, philosophy, psychology, even science and mathematics—the musicians associated with this tradition originally laid the groundwork. That’s a story the history books won’t tell you. And though their significance is mostly forgotten nowadays, the signs of their innovations are everywhere for those perceptive enough to see them. – Ted Gioia, Music to Raise the Dead
As Einstein said (though now in 21st Century terms), we have tried to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s software—which often caused the problem in the first place. It is not only relevant but absolutely necessary to [expand] our levels of consciousness. Westerners, including Christians, are rediscovering the value of nonduality: a way of thinking, acting, reconciling, boundary-crossing, and bridge-building… not throwing out our rational mind, but adding nondual, mystical, contemplative perspectives. – Richard Rohr
We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid. Until we can embrace the reality of the “don't know” mind, we will be vulnerable to our ongoing ego's fear attact tactics. – Pema Chödrön (adapted), Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion, Shambhala, 2018.
[Can] any of us truly believe that we are capable of creating world peace when we can't find it in our intimate relationships with family, partners, friends, and neighbors? – bell hooks
Mid-Afternoon After Valentine's DayMid-Winter afternoon hike, half-way
around the neighborhood,
ear-buds blazing
“Afternoon Delight” by the
Starlight Vocal Band. Sunlight
as only mid-afternoon winter contains it.
Stopped mid-hike to watch a couple
holding hands, strolling, lost in their
mid-twenties reveries,
their eternal journey only half-way
into this mid-Winter
afternoon delight.
– jab
Indeed, love may appear to us as some kind of fresh blush on a newly awakened face, arising from relationship—one that has learned, or better perhaps is being remembered, how in the presence of the other to risk everything in each and every and even this very moment.
Searching in all the wrong places?
This Odin's day is shared with the traditions of St. Valentine. And the mailbox contains the predictably mysterious . . .
Take up the probable possibility that love is innate in all beings.
We do not need to go out and find love; rather,
we need to be still and let love discover us. – John O’Donohue
The poet had a radical idea: the seed of a story that will heal the world…In the story, human beings are not the protagonists of the world. Love is. – Gareth Higgins and Brian D. McLaren, The Seventh Story (e-book) Center for Action and Contemplation, 2018.
Beannacht / Blessing
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mend your life. – John O’Donohue, from Echoes of Memory. Transworld Publishing, 2010