"There they go, chanting again." "Maybe that is what really matters," Equitius said. "What? The chanting?" "You. Constantly getting in touch with God. Getting others to do it, too. They sing with their hearts, these people. For all I know, they may keep the world alive by what they're doing."
Wisdom means "to see" or "to know". It does not mean knowing facts or having an opinion. Wisdom is uncovered by being present enough to perceive the essence of your whole experience. This wisdom will help you attend to what matters in your life and understand the meaning of your life's changes. The practice of moment-to-moment PRESENCE is key. Seeing essence; knowing wholeness.
Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart and finding delight in doing it. And the DELIGHT is the sense of the sacred.
May you be blessed abundantly this summer season, dear friends! May you open your hearts to nurture your soul in silence each day; for WISDOM flows from the Heart of Divine Love to all who are receptive ... and the world is sorely in need of more Wisdom.
Little by little, from a deep level, the Spirit of Wisdom is showing herself. Sophia dwells in the hearts of those who seek new dreams and hope for a more wholesome world: the Dorothy Days, the Martin Luther Kings, the Archbishop Romeros ... [there are so many now!]. Sophia rejoices in the visionaries and the peace-makers. She fills them. In a world which is hungry, tired and seeking, God's presence is shown in Sophia through people who are to experience, in our insecure world, God's wholesome vision and dream for the human race, born of both the masculine and the feminine Holy Energies.
SUMMER BLESSINGS, dear friends! May your vacations, family gatherings, and rereation traveling be balanced with inward diving into the depths of silence and solitude. Re-creation and renewal, peace and harmony become summer fruits of this inner-outer balance. Thus are you true to yourself.
It was from my experience in alternating work at the Red Cross and forest service that I began to learn the difference between loneliness and solitude. I now believe that loneliness occurs when our lives are somehow missing one-half of a pair of opposites — being and doing. We can be very busy and surrounded by people yet still feel intense loneliness because our lives are dominated by "doing;" there is insufficient time for attentive solitude with our thoughts and feeling. When your life is filled with too much doing, the only cure for loneliness is a strong dose of solitude, a form of solitude that is meditative and open to your inner self.
~ from BALANCING HEAVEN AND EARTH by Robert A. Johnson
We are made for solitude. Our lives may be rich in relationships, but the human self remains a mystery of enfolded inwardness that no other person can possibly enter and know. If we fail to embrace our ultimate aloneness and seek meaning only in communion with others, we wither and die. The farther we travel toward the great mystery, the more at home we must be with our essential aloneness in order to stay healthy and whole. Our equal and opposite needs for solitude and community constitute a great paradox.
Our image of solitude is often negative: withdrawal, isolation, distance from others. But this misrepresents the hermitage which is like a silent, invisible spiritual concourse; a place where many can converge without sinking into a crowd, and become a community of love. Every human heart is a hermitage, if we care to enter and find ourselves there in union with all. In solitude friend, foe, and stranger are equally known in love.
