when you’ve come back home to the heart and are ready to return to choosing love over power, compassion over fear and construction over destruction, america/the world/the cosmos is ready and waiting for our labors of love, for what the poet, Langston Hughes whispers…
O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!
~
we can do this!
today’s journey is surreal… it’s election day in the usa and i am still blown away… more than ever, i want to open this contemplation with a psalm i love sharing on election days…
Psalm 15
Lord, who can be trusted with power,
and who may act in your place?
Those with a passion for justice,
who speak the truth from their hearts;
who have let go of selfish interests
and grown beyond their own lives;
who see the wretched as their family
and the poor as their flesh and blood.
They alone are impartial
and worthy of the people’s trust.
Their compassion lights up the whole earth,
and their kindness endures forever.
(The Psalms, translations by Stephen Mitchell)
i feel in this moment of crisis = danger/hidden opportunity, i want to utter this song again and again, to infuse the cosmos with a passion for justice overflowing our one heart with truth and compassion… all over the planet there’s so much suffering, all over the planet there’s so much love… our work is cut out for us… to summon every bit of courage and stand in love and stand for love again and again…
will you join me in this moment, in every moment in a smile (start my internal love engine) and breathe in deeply the boundless love all around us informing us every moment is a teacher with a healing gift of grace for love is the most powerful medicine, the most powerful energy of all…
once we’ve put on our own oxygen mask, we can generously share this eternally renewable energy source with everyone and everything we encounter and meet along our way…
may we all be bridge-builders, menders of brokenness, givers of beauty for wounded places… because we know in our heart in order to be whole, we must accept each of our parts as the beloved, yes each of the trillions and trillions of threads of the web of life…
today’s pilgrimage on the eve of election, (yes, i’m hearing on the eve of destruction and quickly transmuting it to the eve of construction) is a day of transition between pilgrimages… returning from standing rock with a day’s breather before taking off the next day for machu picchu – thanks very much to pilgrim friends who are carrying me in our one heart, that same one heart where i carry you in every moment and with every breath… thank you ee cummings for this poem of one heartedness…
strangely enough on this eve of election, i feel deep joy welling in me and truly a peace passing all understanding with a strong knowing that all is well whatever it is…
do you also feel the dream of the new world awakening? a dream as old as the mountains and hills… a dream that that will take all the love we can give… a dream alive at standing rock and all the other standing rocks all over the world… a dream of honoring our mother the earth and her waters of life and the air we breathe… a dream of re-membering the meek, the peaceful inherit the earth and share oneness with all our relations… one love, one cosmos, one family re-joy-sing that in this moment we are free…
many years ago, i began saying a little mantra that serendipitously returned today…
happy are we, healthy are we, (w)hol(l)y are we
thousandfold thanks for blessing the cosmos with peace
happy are we, healthy are we, (w)hol(l)y are we
thousandfold thanks for blessing the cosmos with peace
i’ll open this peace circle ever wider with Jane Goodall’s song of peace…
We pray to the great Spiritual Power in which
we live and move and have our being.
We pray that we may at all times
keep our minds open to new ideas and shun dogma;
that we may grow in our understanding of the nature of all living beings
and our connectedness with the natural world;
that we may become ever more filled with
generosity of spirit and true compassion and love for all life;
that we may strive to heal the hurts that we have inflicted on nature
and control our greed for material things, knowing that
our actions are harming our natural world and the future of our children;
that we may value each and every human being
for who he is, for who she is,
reaching to the spirit that is within,
knowing the power of each individual to change the world.
namaste
for today’s image that says a thousand words about showing you the lightness of your being, i want to spotlight a ceremony, the rite of the womb, and those who share it and those who hold space for it…
this ceremony comes from a lineage of women going back to the beginning of time who freed themselves from suffering and want this liberation for us all…. we are all to re-member:
the womb is not a place to store fear and pain; the womb is to create and give birth to life…
all means all, this rite is for all for we are all connected to the cosmic womb, the deep earth of pachamama and we are all born of a mother’s womb and we all have an energetic womb, our creative center at the 0 point, the stillpoint of creation…
so many of us hold such pain and fear and terror and anger here which is why we re-member:
the womb is not a place to store fear and pain; the womb is to create and give birth to life…
we nurture this rite and life by saying…
I release my fear so I may embrace freedom
I release my pain so I may embrace joy
I release my anger so I may embrace compassion
I release my sadness so I may embrace peace
such a beautifully simple way for us all to lighten up, to shine, to deepen into luminosity…
for the past four hundred and ninety-five days, i have gathered with another, an extraordinary being of shining light, in sacred communion to voice lovingkindness blessings for all that is… each evening, we join at the threshold to offer ourselves and everything we are to the field out beyond… we envision the whole cosmos joining in and experiencing the true reality of oneness where we see all our relations as numinous love…
invoking this divine light of grace every day is one of the most transformative paths i have ever walked; sauntering along this rainbow trail of devotion daily, with this gifted guide, teaches and shows me the way of saging gracefully…
on this very special day, the anniversary of your birth, i celebrate you with this blessing prayed every morning by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a blessing you walk and talk each day…
May I be a guard for those who need protection
A guide for those on the path
A boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood
May I be a lamp in the darkness
A resting place for the weary
A healing medicine for all who are sick
A vase of plenty, a tree of miracles
And for the boundless multitudes of living beings
May I bring sustenance and awakening
Enduring like the earth and sky
Until all beings are freed from sorrow
And all are awakened.
~
deep bows and boundless love, beloved flow-er of beauty and soul of the space wherever your soles are kissing the earth, our one heart eternally smiles as we walk the spirit path together…
we live in such interesting times… on the one hand, even though wealth inequality is astronomically unbalanced, there are fewer poor people, fewer hungry people, fewer children die and more of us are literate and still we live in an age of anxiety… what’s going on?
we are subjected to a constant barrage of “if it bleeds it leads” headlines, there are mighty problems of violence, injustice and environmental disruption and there’s something else… spiritual malnourishment… we all require feeling needed, we all have a hunger to serve…
as buddhist sages have taught for centuries, “if one lights a fire for others, it will also brighten one’s own way.”
let’s take this moment to kindle our inner fire and others’ outer fires by being lovingkindness and compassion with every breath… nothing is more needed on our planet and we can never have too much of this energy, and, in these interesting times, we are overflowing with opportunities to make a profound difference…
all over the planet, life is out of balance and we know we must change the dream we’ve been living… when we listen to the indigenous, the people of the land who listen to the all that is, we hear the clarion call to love our mother and each other… water, air, trees, sun, moon, stars, all our relatives and we are all relatives woven together intricately, inextricably, interconnectedly…
we can all feel that we are at a tipping point, a sacred space with birth pangs so intense… the moment when we must band together, stand together in love, throw off the illusion of separation, re-member the reality that we are one…
yes, let us take courage and be of strong heart, awaken the dream of the world we all share and long to realize… a world of peace built on justice and guided by our essence, our essence of love…
may we all come together and work for this shared vision…
a poem comes to me, it comes circuitously… written as a ritual celebrating cosmos creation, it seems perfect for this all souls day of honoring the ancestors, sending them back into the night sea to watch us as we emerge and see… sounding and re-sounding the words, we breathing in life and breathing out life in a seamless circle… birth to death to birth to death as one organic whole… join me in bowing to and flowing in beauty…
Ancestor Prayer
When you were born,
The earth became your body,
The stone became your bone,
The sea became your blood,
The sun became your eye,
The moon became your mind,
The wind became your breath.
When you passed to the Otherworld,
Your breath became the wind,
Your mind became the moon,
Your eye became the sun,
Your blood became the sea,
Your bone became the stone,
Your body became the earth.
When we were born, you did the same for us:
You called forth the earth and rocks;
The sea arose and the sun descended;
The moon shone down and the winds sang.
For those who come after, we shall do as you did for us
When we are gone, we shall do as you did before.
Ancestors, we honour you.
Rev. Michael J Dangler
welcome to this new month, numinous november, this new day, all hallows or all hollowed or all saints, this new beginning, this new moment, this beautiful moment… a moment of re-joy-sing following letting go…
re-joy-sing in the place in you where spirit lives, re-joy-sing in the space in you which is of love and light and peace and truth, re-joy-sing in the sun and moon and stars above, re-joy-sing in the fire and earth and water and air, re-joy-sing in the river below, re-joy-sing in the center within, re-joy-sing in rainbowmaking with harmony manifesting…
may we all recognize ourselves in each other re-membering we are one, onederfilled heart…