In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life long and arduous quest after Truth and soul requires inward restfulness to attain its full height.
The silence of the storm dominated everything. There are no words to describe a quiet so potent. I knew the snow was echoing a stillness that exists, hidden, in everything. I saw that this stillness generates all life. And sitting there in the snow, I wept at the profound sound and power of that silence.
I began to see the falling flakes as yellow bursts of energy, as light and as I looked at the light I saw that its total composition was Love. That night I suspended many cherished beliefs. The snow was alive.
"Is there enough Silence for the Word to be heard?"
Every Blessing, dear friends. As summer dies into autumn, we can feel new energy, new life. For life is eternal ... how could it be otherwise? There is a universal continuity, an infinite and ever-flowing consciousness that we forget at our birth and return to at our physical death, where we pass into the Realm of Love. This Love is present to and with us throughout our lives. As young children, we naturally live in both the earthly and heavenly realms until the material world with its wondrous possibilities and myriad distractions becomes the norm.
Blessed are those who learn to see beyond the Veil, who communicate with the angels and lovingly co-create with the community of those who have entered true Life! As we die to all that is not life-giving here and now, we more easily make the transition when Love calls to us.
For me, as a physician, there is no surer evidence that something glorious and wonderful lies beyond our mortal existence. Death is not an end. It is a new beginning. It entails a magnificent reunion with God and all the wonderful souls that we've ever loved or will love. This is our destination when we pass over. Dying is not the end but rather a shift to a fresh form of life, a new and glorious manifestation of ourselves. In this regard, death would seem to be just another dramatic transition in a continuing cycle, similar tin quality to birth. We jettison our mortal shell as we pass from one life form and consciousness to another, more wondrous than the latter.
Death is transformation and it occurs constantly. Every moment that has passed is death. Each moment gives us the opportunity to live in the present. The past does not exist. The future has yet to come. I am dying all the time. I am adapting to every change in life. I die every day because I am not attached to what happened a moment ago, I let it go, and this makes me free. When we surrender to death, we live only in the moment.
I began to face death and its implications very young. I could never have imagined then how many kinds of death there were to follow, one heaped upon another. The death that was the tragic loss of my country, Tibet, after the Chinese occupation. The death that is exile. The death of losing everything my family and I possessed ... for we had been among the wealthiest and most famous in Tibet.
~ from THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING by Sogyal Rinpoche
I think that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed
With their last breath those we love do not say good-bye -- for love is timeless. Instead, they leave us a solemn promise that when they are finally at rest they will continue to be present to us whenever they are called upon. Let us fear not, nor grieve beyond letting go the departure of those we have greatly loved, for in the Tree of Life their roots and our own are forever intertwined.
Her eyes filled with tears, but she said quietly, "I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard."
Then, in the loss of all the world, when I might have said the words I had so long wanted to say, I could not say them. I saw that I was not going to be able to say them. I saw that I was not going to talk without crying, and so I cried.
She looked at me and held out her hand. She gave me the smile that I had never seen and will not see again in this world, and it covered me all over with light.
Grandmother spoke. "For eighty winters I have lived among you and now the World of Spirit is calling me to the other side. As winter brings to a close each cycle of seasons, so death brings to a close the cycle of our lives. I have loved all of you as my children and you must remember, after winter comes spring; also, after death comes birth and a new beginning.
~ from EYES OF WISDOM, Book I, by Heyoka Merrifield
If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.
The death of those whom we love and who love us opens up the possibility of a new, more radical communion, a new intimacy, a new belonging to each other. If love is stronger than death, then death has the potential to deepen and strengthen the bonds of love.
It is only when we have died that our spirits can completely reveal themselves. The spirit of love, once freed from our mortal bodies. will blow where it will, even when few will hear its coming and going.
"Is there enough Silence for the Word to be heard?"
Heartfelt good wishes, dear friends! Creation ... Creator ... Creativity. We are all born into Creation to become co-creators with the Great Architect of all Life. Moment by moment, creativity flows through us, inviting us to create and re-create our own lives into Love being expressed. Silence is like a river that keeps our "creative juices" flowing. At each new dawn throughout eternity, the world is made new. And so it is with us; how we choose to live, think, and act becomes the blueprint of our own creation. Wherever we are, whatever our age and circumstance ... creation continues.
From the tension of the dark empty depths an idea began to emerge. It was that space between not knowing and knowing, that tension between losing and finding, that blank page between silence and song, that emptiness that creates the need to create, to try, to imagine, to solve.
Creative people tend to see life's problems as opportunities to exercise their creativity, to explore something new, to build character, to grow spiritually, and to develop self-knowledge. Love, creativity, and gentleness are closely linked. People who are creative and open to life are more able to learn to love others and themselves. Once we learn the art of turning problems into opportunities, there is no more distinction between self-love and the love of others.
~ from THE ZEN TEACHINGS OF JESUS by Kenneth S. Leong
Creativity is the urge to wholeness, the urge to individuation or to the becoming of what one truly is. And in that becoming we bring the cosmos into form.
There are creative seeds buried in people, no matter how oppressed they have been, and you can find these seeds in their stories. With the recent extreme rains here, seeds of plants that have been dormant for centuries are sprouting. They have somehow kept themselves alive for all that time. This same potential is always alive inside people.
A mature creative life, which has discovered its source, finds it is linked to everything. Creation actually requires too little from us, and there is not much in our culture that teaches us to pay attention to the things that require less. These things give birth to the unpredictable surprises that inspire a larger and deeper soul connection with creative life. With the soul well tended, even when all is lost, our creation lives larger than its physical limits. The best that any of us can do with the heaven and hell that surrounds us is to become willing participants in the unfolding of our soul's life. Any creative act emerging from this tending becomes one with the elements of the Mystery.
Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is "to fit together" and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating, whether it is to make a loaf of bread or a life.
