Dreaming in the Morning

I had such a beautiful dream about running this morning, that I woke forgetting the summer cold that has taken lodging in my chest.  Nonetheless, dreams of freedom and expansive green fields have inspired much and many.  Or can, at least, get us out of bed.  There is much in this life we must bless and release, but let us heed the advice to dismiss nothing.   Such arrogance is doing much harm in this beautiful world.      

 

May you be blessed with vision today.

See it for the first time

By plucking her petals, you do not
gather the beauty of the flower.

Clouds come floating into my life,
no longer to carry rain or usher storm,
but to add colour to my sunset sky.

Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is only putting out the lamp
because the dawn has come.

Do not say, ‘It is morning,’
and dismiss it with a name of yesterday.
See it for the first time
as a newborn child that has no name.

Don’t limit a child to your own learning,
for he was born in another time.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil
is no freedom for the tree.

Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Every difficulty slurred over
will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

Everything comes to us that belongs to us
if we create the capacity to receive it.

Faith is the bird that feels the light
when the dawn is still dark.

From the solemn gloom of the temple
children run out to sit in the dust,
God watches them play and forgets the priest.

I have become my own version of an optimist.
If I can’t make it through one door,
I’ll go through another door - or I’ll make a door.
Something terrific will come
no matter how dark the present.

—Rabindranath Tagore. With thanks to it's all dhamma.   

   

Home Is Where the Mysterious Heart Is

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home. It is a journey we can make only by the acceptance of mystery and of mystification—by yielding to the condition that what we have expected is not there.

—Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness

I love the phrase, arriving "at the ground at our own feet."  We must begin with the humble beginnings of who we are in the bodies we have today.   We will be always be called further along, but most of us will not leave our own skin today.  Tomorrow, perhaps.  These passages are usually not for us to calculate.   Our call is always to come home to the moment.  Not as a this or a that, but as being.  A wise elder shared with me a few days ago:  "The only way I can live in faith is accepting that God is a mystery. Faith is not knowing.  We do not know, so we go in faith."   Despite our fears and our graspings, we really do not need God, or ourselves, to be a quantifiable this or a that.  We do, however, very much need God, and ourselves, to faithfully be where we are - and where we are is quite mysterious indeed.     

   

Today, I arrive at the ground of my own feet and fingers, and begin to write again.  I am grateful to reconnect.    

 

I pray the summer is bringing you a sense of connection and joy - in the home of your being in our beautifully mysterious God.    

 

My thanks to Parabola for sharing Wendell Berry's wise musing.