2017

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Jo Beall

ah, today is one of those days when all i can be is totally surrendered in the present moment… in great pain with the flareup of an old eye injury, unable to see or just barely out of the other eye and so able to breathe peace and listen deeply…

For Presence
Awaken to the mystery of being here
and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.
Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon.
Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to
follow its path.
Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity.
May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame.
May anxiety never linger about you.
May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of
soul.
Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek
no attention.
Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven
around the heart of wonder.
~ John O’Donohue ~

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 269 – 9/11/2017

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Jo Beall

honoring our collective dark night on 9/11

fear knocks on our door today, we welcome this guest and begin to pray

please grant us the courage, the heart to be hospitable

come, holy spirit., come, help us to stay

in a space of feeling vulnerable

thousandfold thanks for hearing our plea

sending golden light to embrace and cradle us gently

empowering the gift of seeing light in life’s darkest moments

coming home to the heart, courageous new world bathed in luminescence

~

a day of re-membering, a day of moment after moment of connecting the dots, a day of walking through the shadowlands and taking one more step and one more step, a day of surrendering all to the call to be true, a day of centering in the stillpoint listening deeply to ancestors’ whispers… empty, surrender, let go, be present, relax, trust, open our one heart a little wider receiving the eternal unstoppable flow, a day of dancing divinely on the rainbow trail…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 268 – 9/10/2017

Posted on September 10, 2017 by Jo Beall

what an honor to celebrate grandmother wisdom for this week’s edition of the astonishing light of being and that today is the fourth anniversary of the first official outer poetic peace pilgrimage is icing on the cake…

the grandmothers, women of wisdom, white-hairs, moon-pause relatives have always been tasked with nurturing the spirit of all the children of the cosmos…

may we all deeply listen and receive the blessing of the divine mother…

“May you find in me the Mother of the World.
May my heart be a mother’s heart, my hands be a mother’s hands.
May my response to your suffering be a mother’s response to your suffering.
May I sit with you in the dark, like a mother sits in the dark.
May you know through our relationship that there is something in this world that can be trusted.”

May we all know how completely we belong in the sacred web of life, in the great cosmic field of mystery…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 267 – 9/9/2017

Posted on September 9, 2017 by Jo Beall

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions… For the god
wants to know himself in you.

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 266 – 9/8/2017

Posted on September 8, 2017 by Jo Beall

in the midst of all the suffering that is so visibly, viscerally with us, i, too, feel led and held in the deep peace at the eye of the storm…

thank you to farmer of the heart and of the land, Wendell Berry, for so aptly describing the experience of walking this pathless path… the moments when the rubber touches the road and we are given the opportunity to walk our talk, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to walk in light, to walk in love, to listen deeply within for which way to go, to trust we are being pulled along the path with heart…

thank you to the cosmic hum for singing our soul song through our bones, for leading us along the spirit path…

may we all love beyond measure, understanding and conditions re-membering our true nature as a communion of compassionate cooperatives dwelling in a responsive cosmos cross-pollinated with every breath’s love and light…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 265 – 9/7/2017

Posted on September 7, 2017 by Jo Beall

“A true vocation requires shedding anything that would impede or obscure the call. A true pilgrimage requires letting go of the very things most people try to hold onto. In seeking after what the soul desires we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow. As the old proverb says, “Before you begin the journey, you own the journey. Once you have begun, the journey owns you.” After all, what good is a dream that doesn’t test the mettle of the dreamer? What good is a path that doesn’t carry us to the edge and then beyond that place? A true calling involves a great exposure before it can become a genuine refuge.”
– Michael Meade –

~

The Journey

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

small, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving
you are arriving.

~ David Whyte ~

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 264 – 9/6/2017

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Jo Beall

today, under the abundance of the pisces full moon, i rest in and harvest compassionate abiding waiting patiently for the new, the transformation promised by the soular eclipse… as i harvest the fruits, i reflect on what’s to come – a planet of peace guided by love…

~

We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but on the positive affirmation of peace.

We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody, that is far superior to the discords of war. Somehow, we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race, which no one can win, to a positive contest to harness humanity’s creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all the nations of the world. In short, we must shift the arms race into a peace race.

If we have a will – and determination – to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 263 – 9/5/2017

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Jo Beall

i’ve been dreaming of fires for a couple of moons, our world going up in smoke, fires in the streets…

today, i wake up to acrid smoke enveloping the atmosphere with ash falling like snow across an apocalyptic landscape…

as thousands of acres continue to burn in the beloved Columbia Gorge, we grieve the loss of so much natural beauty that inspires and uplifts connecting us to our better angels, deepest sacred space of earth being….

today’s peace, so i imagined, would center on the full moon and then i walked outside and tuned into local news and knew today must be devoted to the all encompassing grief for all the storms and floods and wildfires and bombings raging across the earth…

please join me in sacred silence of the deep peace of the running wave as we breathe down into the belly of the earth being instruments of peace and vessels of compassion as we call forth healing…

singing as one… where there is suffering, let there be grace; where there is imbalance, let balance be restored; where there is homelessness, shelter; where there is thirst, water; where thee is hunger, nourishment; where there is despair, hope; where there is destruction, creation; where there is war, peace…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 262 – 9/4/2017

Posted on September 4, 2017 by Jo Beall

for labor day…

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God –

a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

~ Mary Oliver ~

~

Top 7 Pieces of Rare Good News for US Workers on Labor Day

1. The Christian Science Monitor says that in 2016, US solar businesses employed 260,077 workers – up 25 percent from 2015.

2. That is, the solar energy sector alone employs more people than Apple, Google, and Facebook combined!

3. Solar also employs more people in US electricity generation than oil, gas and coal combined!

4. Solar energy sector jobs grew at a rate 17 times faster than the economy in 2016.

5. SC Times reports that wind jobs grew 9 times faster than the economy as a whole in 2016 and adds,

6. “wind turbine technician is the fastest-growing job in the country.”

7. Each day, US workers erect 10 new wind turbines around America. Each creates 44 years of full-time employment. So at an average of 30 years per worker, that is the equivalent of generating over 200,000 full time jobs that last for a lifetime every year.

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

~

the day after his final speech, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968… King went to support garbage workers, who were on strike to protest unsafe conditions, abusive supervisors, low wages and to gain recognition for their union…

“I would like to live a long life,” he said. “Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.”

~ Martin Luther King, Jr ~

~

the best way to get there is every day to continue the struggle for human dignity, workers’ rights, living wages, and social justice…

and, may we all celebrate our laboring, our birthing a onederful world of love…

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 261 – 9/3/2017

Posted on September 3, 2017 by Jo Beall

O, Heart, What A Wonderful Bird You Are…

~ Rumi ~

for this week’s edition of the astonishing light of being, the voice of Beloved sings through Great Spirit shapeshifted as eagle cloud of unknowing… in a lovely synchronicity, today marks the last of 27 days of celebrating the total soular eclipse… below is a poem capturing that moment of totality tho written a century earlier in another land… thank you to the angels for sending this song describing exquisitely the beautiful moment of creation… stillness birthing dance…

~

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away … O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

~ Siegfried Sassoon ~

Abundance Created Together (ACT)

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess. – Rainer Maria Rilke –

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 270 – 9/12/2017

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 269 – 9/11/2017

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 268 – 9/10/2017

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 267 – 9/9/2017

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 266 – 9/8/2017

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 265 – 9/7/2017

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 264 – 9/6/2017

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 263 – 9/5/2017

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 262 – 9/4/2017

Top 7 Pieces of Rare Good News for US Workers on Labor Day

Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage – Year 4 – Day 261 – 9/3/2017