Wisdom is change. Wisdom is both the process and the result of transformation. Wisdom creates, is in constant movement, bringing design to the universe... Wisdom is my commitment to life, my willingness to continue changing, developing, transforming. When I live my life and love the living, all of it -- the births and the deaths, the fullness and the loss -- I wring wisdom out of it. My life is distilled, and wisdom runs rich and strong, a fine essence, through every word and act.
BLESSINGS, dear friends! Precious to the soul are the pauses in the silence in these intense and, all too often, stressful times. May we each bless ourselves and those around us with soul-breaks throughout the day.
There is a way that the soul can get crowded out of one's day. The soul is a bit shy and does not demand center stage. She lives a life of her own, and yet there are soulprints in every fiber of your being, even in things you've forgotten. The soul is the keeper of memories. She knows where beauty is stored. She contains the memories of your entire life. Deep in your unconscious she stands guard. If you are in need of a particular memory she can reveal it to you and help you to bear both the beauty and the pain. She knows all about the gold in your memories.
~ from GOLD IN YOUR MEMORIES by Macrina Wiederkehr
Your soul is your life. Everything else is a fiction -- a mind game in authenticity. Without nourishing your own soul, you can't nourish the world; you can't give what you don't have. As your soul grows, however, it emanates invisibly and involuntarily the light which it has received.
"Hearing with the soul" refers to perception with the spiritual senses, to an awakening of a new quality of perception. It is an inbreaking of a contemplative awareness that is capable of perceiving all reality as illumined and suffused by God, as graced with tremendous potential. ...The awakening of the spiritual senses can happen to all of us. We are all capable of "hearing with the soul."
In the resurrected state, there comes an utter silence of the soul. By that silence, the advanced pilgrim lives in God and lives from God. It is silence of soul that he or she communicates with God. A soul that is thus dead to its own working and to all provision of itself, to that soul, SILENCE becomes both a wonderful TRANSMISSION and RECEIVING of Divine communication.
The soul of humanity, like the soul of the individual, lives only through love. Inspirited life is never immobilised in the barren monotony of mechanism. Ever and again it brings fresh animation, winged by some spirit on whose pinions it bears a kindred and loving life to all it meets.
The World Soul has undergone the long process of evolution, a kind of fall from unity, in order that this unity might be again fulfilled, now fully consciously. Restoring the World Soul to its unity becomes weighted on the side of the development of fully conscious individual soul life: the task of human beings in the destiny of Holy Wisdom.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our Life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home...
Someone who loves us can often see our soul potential more clearly than we can ourselves. When this happens, it has a catalytic effect, it invites and encourages the dormant, undeveloped part of us to come forth and find expression.
The stirrings in the tomb of our darkness are the WHISPERS OF OUR SOUL, urging us to move toward a place where we have not been before. We may be pushed to make changes in our lives that we would never considered otherwise. We may be forced to look at hidden wounds and inner issues that we had always been able to shove aside. We may be led to appreciate life and our gifts at a much deeper level. Most always, the womb of darkness is a catalyst for creativity and for a deeper relationship with God. Always it is a time for trust in the transformative process and for faith that something worthwhile is to be gained by our waiting in the dark.
Our awareness of God is a syntax of the silence in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us. It is the afterglow of years in which soul and sky are silent together, the out-growth of accumulated certainty of the abundant, never-ebbing presence of the divine. All we are called to do is to let the insight be able to listen to the soul's recessed certainty of its being a parenthesis in the immense script of God's eternal speech.
There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul.
God is whispering to us well-nigh incessantly.
Whenever the sounds of the world die out of the soul,
or sink low,
Then we hear these whisperings of God.
Alyosha emerged from the dream transformed. Something burned in his heart, something suddenly filled him almost painfully, tears of rapture nearly burst from his soul. ...Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars. ...Alyosha felt clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable as the heavenly vault descend into his soul. ...Never in his life would he forget that moment.
~ from THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Many people who are secretly weary of work have never given themselves time, or taken time out or away from work, to allow their spirits to catch up. Giving yourself plenty of time is a simple but vital reflective exercise:
Leave all agendas behind you. Let the neglected presence of your soul come to meet and engage you again. It can be a lovely reacquaintance with your forgotten mystery.
Even if your current job does not reflect your dreams and ultimate direction, you can find ways of expressing more of your special qualities while you are looking for your next step forward. If you are committed to expressing your spiritual purpose through your day-to-day activities, then your work will automatically become more satisfying. Think about your current position in life and ask yourself:
How can I best serve others and my own higher purpose through my work? How can my current work become more fulfilling? How can I bring more healing into the world?
I believe that works that touch the Divine or teach us or are still with us centuries after their creation are the ones that did not come out of a place of power or control or techniques, but came at the moment when the heart let go and God answered the question.
Most of us put a great deal of times into work, not only because we have to work so many hours to make a living, but because work is central to the soul's OPUS. We are crafting ourselves -- individuating. Work is fundamental to the OPUS because the whole point of life is the fabrication of the soul.
