Camino

But your loss brought you here to walk
under one name and to walk under one name only,
and to find the guise under which all loss can live;
remember, you were given that name every day
along the way, remember, you were greeted as such,
and treated as such, and you needed no other name,
other people seemed to know you even before you gave up
being a shadow on the road and came into the light,
even before you sat down,
broke bread and drank wine,
wiped the wind-tears from your eyes:
pilgrim they called you again and again. Pilgrim.

Excerpt from the poem ‘CAMINO’
From ‘PILGRIM’: Poems by David Whyte’

Thanks Don and Ali

 LOVE'S DEEPER COMMITMENT

Let's not commit to a future together. The future is so unknown, and we are so fluid, and tired of pretending that we know.

Our thoughts and feelings are ever-changing, uncontrollable, like a wild ocean of love.

Our desires wax and wane; our dreams are born and die in every moment.

Let's not commit to a form of love. The forms are always shifting, like the tides.

We do not need security here. We are not seeking comfort, but Truth.

Let's make a deeper commitment; one that cannot be broken or lost.

To presence. To meeting in the here-and-now.

To bringing all of ourselves. To knowing, and letting ourselves be known.

To telling the truth, today; knowing that our truth may change tomorrow.

To bowing before each other, even if our hearts are broken and tender.

No promises, no guarantees.

Loving takes courage! Yes!

For love is a field, not a form. Let us commit to the field, remember the field in every moment of our precious days on this Earth.

In ten years' time, we may still be together. We may have children. We may live together, or live apart.

We may never see each other again. This may be our last day.

If we are honest, we really do not know; not knowing is our Home.

We may be friends, or lovers, or strangers, or family, or we may remain undefined, beyond narrative, our love unable to be captured in words.

Here at the edge of the known, on the line that once divided sanity from madness, and doubt from certainty, we play, we dance, we drink tea, we touch each other, we cry, we laugh, we meet.

We sacrifice comfort and predictability. But what we gain is astonishing: This tremendous sense of being alive. No longer numb to the mysteries of love, the mysteries of our bodies.

A little raw, perhaps. A little shaky. Maybe a little disoriented, but perhaps this is the price of being totally free.

Maybe an old part of us still seeks mommy or daddy, that Magic Person who will never leave, always be there, take away the loneliness repressed in our guts. Loving that frightened part too; bowing to that part too, but no longer being controlled by it.

And they will ask:

What about your future?

What happens if you have children?

How the hell do you define yourselves?

Why are you afraid of commitment?

Why do you run from security? Comfort? Future?

They will say you are crazy, or you don't understand love, or you are lost, or you are unloving and selfish, and you will smile, and understand their fear, for their fear was once yours, and you cannot abandon your path now.

And nobody has to walk with you. Ever.

At some point, only Truth will satisfy. A living Truth, renewing itself each and every moment, the wild Truth of the open heart.

When Love and Truth are One, when the Commitment is deeply rooted in the breath, we can finally face each other without resentment, and explode into the most melancholy sunsets, held in the most profound joy.

Walking alone, together, alone.

- Jeff Foster

Remembering Atlintown

Recovering Perfectionists Have Way More Fun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ04S2J1-E0&sns=em

Happy Hands.

Thank you Craig Chalquist

"In the present century, when man is actively destroying countless living forms, after wiping out so many societies whose wealth and diversity had, from time immemorial, constituted the better part of his inheritance, it has probably never been more necessary to proclaim, as do the myths, that sound humanism does not begin with oneself, but puts the world before life, life before man, and respect for others before self-interest: and that no species, not even our own, can take the fact of having been on this earth for one or two million years—since, in any case, man’s stay here will one day come to an end—as an excuse for appropriating the world as if it were a thing and behaving on it with neither decency nor discretion." - Claude Levi-Strauss

Forgiveness

FORGIVENESS is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, the act of forgiveness not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to re-imagine our relation to it.

It may be that the part of us that was struck and hurt can never forgive, and that forgiveness itself never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps, not meant to forget…
Stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting… 

Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful question and a way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama, rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.

…at the end of life, the wish to be forgiven is ultimately the chief desire of almost every human being. In refusing to wait; in extending forgiveness to others now, we begin the long journey of becoming the person who will be large enough, able enough and generous enough to receive, at our very end, that necessary absolution ourselves.

‘DESTINY”
Excerpt from CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. © David Whyte & Many Rivers Press 2015

Teaching Our Young Ones Social Justice

Please friends, if you haven't gotten to it yet, sit down with your children and grandchildren and watch Selma.

https://youtu.be/P7ERe_FQOys

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/08/375756377/the-sounds-space-and-spirit-of-selma-a-director-s-take

glide.org