Trust Your Vision

Trust your vision
make it whole
hold it like the Navajo
his solemn desert oracle
in quest of shaman passage
gaining his healing chant
guiding him through life.

Hold the vision
constantly rising
it is the way nature works
through you
it is the only self
an everchanging underdream
a vision (if you see it)
up to you
to make real.

Act on your vision
and pray that you are blessed.

~Stephen Levine

It was like a stream
running into the dry bed
of a lake,
like rain
pouring on plants
parched to sticks.

It was like this world's pleasure
and the way to the other,
both
walking towards me.

If you find that meditation does not come easily in your city room, be inventive and go out into nature. Nature is always an unfailing fountain of inspiration. To calm your mind, go for a walk at dawn in the park, or watch the dew on a rose in a garden. Lie on the ground and gaze up into the sky, and let your mind expand into its spaciousness. Let the sky outside awaken a sky inside your mind. Stand by a stream and mingle your mind with its rushing; become one with its ceaseless sound. Sit by a waterfall and let its healing laughter purify your spirit. Walk on a beach and take the sea wind full and sweet against your face. Celebrate and use the beauty of moonlight to poise your mind. Sit by a lake or in a garden and, breathing quietly, let your mind fall silent as the moon comes up majestically and slowly in the cloudless night.

OK, so if anyone asks...this is what i would love for my Birthday!!!

Hara Diagnosis: Reflections on the Sea (Paradigm Title) (Hardcover)

by Kiiko Matsumoto and Stephen Birch

JD Carmona and Reece Johnson

Married August 16, 2008

Hip, Hip Hooray!

To work with changes now, in life: That is the real way to prepare for death. Life may be full of pain, suffering, and difficulty, but all of these are opportunities handed to us to help us move toward an emotional acceptance of death. It is only when we believe things to be permanent that we shut off the possibility of learning from change. Sogyal Rinpoche

What most of us need, almost more than anything, is the courage and humility really to ask for help, from the depths of our hearts: to ask for the compassion of the enlightened beings, to ask for purification and healing, to ask for the power to understand the meaning of our suffering and transform it; at a relative level to ask for the growth in our lives of clarity, peace, and discernment, and to ask for the realization of the absolute nature of mind that comes from merging with the deathless wisdom mind of the master.

Sogyal Rinpoche

The Valley of the Quest

When you begin the Valley of the Quest
Misfortunes will deprive you of all rest,
Each moment some new trouble terrifies,
And parrots there are panic-stricken flies.
There years must vanish while you strive and grieve;
There is the heart of all you will achieve --
Renounce the world, your power and all you own,
And in your heart's blood journey on alone.
When once your hands are empty, then your heart
Must purify itself and move apart
From everything that is -- when this is done,
The Lord's light blazes brighter than the sun,
Your heart is bathed in splendour and the quest
Expands a thousandfold within your breast.
Though fire flares up across the path, and though
A hundred monsters peer out from its glow,
The pilgrim driven on by his desire
Will like a moth rush gladly on the fire.
When love inspires his heart he begs for win,
One drop to be vouchsafed him as a sign --
And when he drinks this drop both worlds are gone;
Dry-lipped he founders in oblivion.
His zeal to know faith's mysteries will make
Him fight with dragons for salvation's sake --
Though blasphemy and curses crowd the gate,
Until it opens he will calmly wait,
And then where is this faith? this blasphemy?
Both vanish into strenghless vacancy.

Farid ud-Din Attar