To speak the truth through our words and through our
lives is the obligation that authenticates spirituality
in us humans. Spirituality is mysterious, but this
we do know: spirituality is the way wherein we will
experience vitality, truth, and transformation.
~ from OUR UNIVERSAL SPIRIT JOURNEY by John P. Cock
When I fully enter time's swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.
Because of my blindness, I had developed a new faculty. Strictly speaking, we all have it, but almost all forget to use it. That faculty is attention. In order to live without eyes it is necessary to be very attentive, to remain hour after hour in a state of wakefulness, of receptiveness and activity. Indeed, attention is not simply a virtue of intelligence or the result of education, and something one can easily do without. It is a state of being . . . a state without which we shall never know wholeness. In its truest sense it is the listening post of the universe.
~ from AGAINST THE POLLUTION OF THE I by Jacques Lusseyrann
All of my life has been a relearning to pray—a letting go of incantational magic, petition, and vain repetition ""Me Lord, me," instead of watching attentively for the light that burns at the center of every star, every cell, every living creature, every human heart.
~ Chet Raymo in NATURAL PRAYERS as quoted in EARTH'S ECHO by Robert Hamma
Each age has its own tasks. For most of us now, our monasteries have no walls except the silence our meditation gathers to the center of our lives, and this is enough—it is more than enough. Our hermitage is the act of living with attention in the midst of things; amid the rhythms of work and love, the bath with the child, the endlessly growing paperwork, the ever-present likelihood of war, the necessity for taking action to help the world. For us, a good spiritual life is permeable and robust. It faces things squarely knowing the smallest moments are all we have, and that even the smallest moment is full of happiness.
~ from THE LIGHT INSIDE THE DARK by John Tarrant, as reprinted in AN ALMANAC FOR THE SOUL by Marv and Nancy Hiles
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Greetings, dear friends! As creatures emerge from dens and frozen ponds and seedlings poke up toward the light from deep layers of earth so we, too, emerge from winter grateful for life and breath and the gift of movement. Is it joy that makes us dance or dancing that brings us in touch with joy? Sufi whirlers recognize that all life is turnings and revolutions—electrons spinning around nuclei, blood cycling round from heart to limb and back again, planets orbiting, wind and wave whirling. They dance the narrative of spiritual journey, reaching beyond ego toward divine love and channeling that love out into the world. Children naturally live out their feelings and thoughts and explorations of the world through their bodies. Many spiritual traditions connect meditation with movement, posture with prayer, and body with mind and heart. However you express gratitude for being alive, embrace it with your whole being.
In this little corner of the world we welcome spring, made all the sweeter by the relentlessness of the passing winter. So many treasures in nature are tiny, unassuming graces— diminutive wildflowers, wriggling tadpoles, crimson ladybugs, and the melodic double songs of the brown thrasher. To blink or hurry by is to miss them. We live in a smog of attention deficit disorder; I don't mean the children, but all of us on this treadmill of overstimulation. In this culture of too much, too busy, too distracted, too bombarded, can we learn to sift through the chaos and lift out the truly important? I have become almost obsessed with butterfly watching— luminous wings call to me as if to say, follow my flight path, sit patiently while I feel the sun's warmth on my wings, see how I unfurl my perfect little straw to sip this nectar. I want to learn how to focus on small, sacred moments that nurture the soul.
