Threads

A beautiful essay was written by Christy Croft that I share here: Intellectual Curiosity as Holy Devotion.

The author touches on many themes that resonate with me; she and I share a similar path. As she writes about how to embrace the tension of opposites, she states evocatively that

I’m still learning how to knit these threads. Sometimes, I do so with the tight, precise stitches of academic study and critical reflection; other times I do so with the loosest of weaves, dancing between theology, personal narrative, myth, metaphysics, and ecstatic mysticism in my everyday language as if there were no divisions, no binding categories of speech or cognition. It’s a work in progress. I’m a work in progress.

A Solitary Dancing Slipper

To admire the strong, the sturdy, the confident who grace the vast expanse of our experience and do not even notice when their time has past — is a wonder. Many flock to such a unique and gifted soul that does not hesitate to raise her face, high, chin tilted; tis her nature not her desire that carries her through that life, where mine is short or subtle cry escapes. She could no more be me, than I her, and if dwelling in her true nature she holds no bold proclamation of being “better than” for she bears a tremendous responsibility to all those who seek her out and beg of her essence in excessive quantities. To bee and butterfly she is Queen and her mantle could weigh heavily if she were not at ease in her own individuality, born to this, her duty, her vocation.

I do not want this, though I admire her qualities … her beauty, abundance, sweetness, praises sung to her that vibrate across the land. Look how long she has to live! Look how much she has to give! Devoted to those who bow in her presence as they redeem their devotions from her stores of energy.

Yes, she may grow earlier, stand stronger, give more, spread, be admired by all, living longer, and feel no defeat when felled in her own time. Yet, honest and praiseworthy though she may be, would be a shame if were no diversity.

So let her spread in obvious profusion, and I in my hidden glen, a single stem of green wearing a pink slipper, shall dance unseen in dappled dim day and mellow moonlight while the air carries my essence, the rain and dew linger in my cup that allows a few in need to drink, a brief interlude I stand here swaying and then just as softly sink into the humus for another long, sweet sleep, thankful that a devotee held a chalice into which the unique essence of this moment and me could seep. I am become immortal, outside the bounds of time and space when in Gaia’s Grace, and known as both separate and One. Feel into Her — now. Do not wait, for my time, my nature, may not be the longest stranding or hardiest or sweetest, but I am vital if only to offer a solitary sip to a weary traveler in a hidden forest.

The poetry portal by Emily that led me into the above was: 

These

Another poem from dear Ms. Emily …

Copyright © 2012 all-free-download.com

I’ve nothing else — to bring, You know — 

So I keep bringing These — 

Just as the Night keeps fetching stars

To our familiar eyes — 

Maybe, we shouldn’t mind them — 

Unless they didn’t come — 

Then — maybe, it would puzzle us 

To find our way Home — 

~~~ Emily Dickinson

______________________

What is the unique gift within? What do I bring into the world to each person who might intersect the path I travel? With whom do I interact? What little offering do I make that seems small and insignificant, my love and caring minuscule among the grander gestures. And yet, if I cannot find my own way home without them … maybe someone else would be confused, too, without one of the pebbles I’ve placed in my travels to give a glimmer of hope and guidance? We navigate by different stars among the billions that surround us every night dark and inviting, the Grand Gesture is in the lead perhaps but how boring it would be without all the others to inspire and delight us along the way! Without myriad stars, a placid journey would ensue to a single destination without detour or adventure or the background painted luminous into rapture upon raised faces!

“I keep bringing These” … these reflections, ideas, stories, visions, healing remedies.

Maybe they are someone else’s “way Home,” too?

… I bring quiet, contentment, caring, sanctuary, depth.

Maybe they are someone else’s “way Home,” too?

… I bring giggles, sweets, slowness, smiles.

Maybe they are someone else’s “way Home,” too?

… I bring gratitude, devotion, creativity, kindness.

Maybe they are someone else’s “way Home,” too?

… I bring stillness, song, slumber, realization.

Maybe they are someone else’s “way Home,” too?

… I bring sacred space, perspective, joy, respect.

Maybe they are someone else’s “way Home,” too?

… I bring earth, water, fire, air, space.

Maybe they are someone else’s “way Home,” too?

… I bring listening, empathy, exploration, curiosity, conversation.

Maybe they are someone else’s “way Home,” too?

I often use someone else’s stars to find my way home.

Maybe These will help someone find their way home?

Stars in a cosmic womb to which we return Home again and again.

The womb is Home and the stars guide our way like fireflies, smiling encouragement with their familiarity.

Each of us is a star to another, to others, sometimes few, sometimes many.

Keep twinkling even if you’re not the North Star!

Leaf on the Wind

The dry leaf scrapes across the sandstone reflecting the approaching death that frees us to fly more easily in the air. We release the weight of excess earth and water, and we are lifted by the slightest breeze or thought to soar and gain a different perspective from that which we knew much earlier.

Dangers faced by the dry leaf are going too high so that it disconnects forever, or alternatively, catching fire from the tiniest spark and being incinerated instantly to the ash of invisibility without leaving a trace behind except cellular memory to feed the next life, which is fine if that was the purpose—there is no shame in being the nutrients for another life’s expression. Just know and be aware of what is happening; don’t be asleep to possibility and who you are ensouled to be.

Fly and land, fly and land, sometimes skipping across the surface of where others have walked or grown; sometimes flying above for the broad perspective and distant travel to a land in a forest where none of the other leaves look like you and they are heavy, wet, as they contentedly decay into the thick humus of the forest floor and invite you to join them, all glumpied together until it becomes impossible to see where one ends and another begins in the “communion of subjects”*—is this your purpose? To be one with them? Look at all the good that they do! All the nourishment they provide for community diversity! Or will you thank them and lift a brittle edge to fling yourself upon the next zephyr and fly out of the forest to see the next land and spread the word of the previous community? Off you go…wheeeeee!

What’s that vast expanse of blue below? A mirror of the sky and your slender soaring form? A fish leaps out of the smooth surface and as soon as it disappears a bird dives after it to emerge an instant later swallowing the fish. The bird calls out to you a warning not to land on the liquid mirror unless you are ready to stop traveling, for the water will quickly saturate you, and you will sink to the muddy bottom to become food for the lake creatures. Are you ready? Or is there more to see and share?

Your edges are getting ragged and torn; you even have a few holes in your cloak punching through the veins of your fragile skeleton. But, no, not quite ready and so you call to the wind for a ride and climb once more…high, higher.

There is a snow-capped peak of a mauve mountain that beckons with its swirling mist of white flakes and its song serenades you like the sirens of old on oceans of past lives. There!That’s it. That’s where your purpose lies. To fall apart in bits and scatter yourself upon the edge between forest and alpine tundra, there at the timberline edge where you can see both sides and rest in the unknowing of self, at peace. Your bits will continue to scatter themselves over the entire mountain and beyond so that you are disbursed invisibly, only the most minuscule bit disintegrating and then integrating here and there.

Your essence scattered, nothing intact, gone from sight yet everywhere, back to mingle with the stardust of your origin that wasn’t one at all for there is no beginning or end, only transformation.

________________

*Thomas Berry

Barefoot Spirituality

Would it help for someone to understand my intimacy with Gaia, the journey to reach my own sacredness and the on-going path into personal spirituality? I know that one of my joys is to read of other’s spiritual journeys and beliefs, for that opens me into my own wholeness. And so I write of my journey on this path–in my books and on this blog–to share, to commune with the energy of others.

I don’t follow one faith or religion or system. I’m far too questioning — far too much of a seeker straddling a rickety fence as I cross one more field — to embrace fully someone else’s path. But, and this is significant for me, I value something in every path of Spirit I’ve read about or witnessed because of core similarities. And I know that there are many concerns in cultural groups, in indigenous peoples, in ethnic families and tradition, as well as in established religions — concerns that picking out what is appealing may be viewed as disrespectful, but I absolutely do have deep respect for these other systems and traditions.

Yet, perhaps I am also genetically disposed to always be journeying along a more eclectic and individualized path in approaching the Divine. Because I am a hybrid, a melting-pot American who lives and expresses the cellular and morphic-field memories of German, English, Swiss, French, Scots, Scots-Irish, Black Dutch, and various tribes of Native American, do I wander back and forth more easily? And those are only the links I am aware of; there are probably more after 350 years of generations moving about on this North American continent.

In spite of the above — details of which I only came to know as I aged — I mostly grew up without conscious awareness of ethnicity or cultural heritage other than ‘white, middle/working-class American.’ And, while I was raised in the Ozarks into a particular Christian denomination, it never resonated deeply.

The Divine within me remained asleep like Snow White, waiting for the kiss of the one I would recognize. And She was years coming. I needed to grow and learn more about this personality housing my soul before I would feel Her awaken within and provide guidance upon a spiritual path.

But when she finally opened Her eyes (or I opened mine), our love and my remembrance was instant. She had been with me all along; I knew that at once. And yet, while I recognized Her, and followed at first the path of those who shared their own journeys and systems of belief, I found before long that the Divine within me couldn’t be fenced in here either, no more than my nature could. Neither of us could handle being penned up or caged, defined or labeled. And so we took the next fork in the trail, together, knowing our journey of discovery was personal and individual and solitary.

I knew that I might never find a ‘perfect fit’ and that was fine. It’s okay. I would try on spiritual shoes, boots, sandals, moccasins, all shapes and sizes. Some feel comfortable for a while, but then I have to pull them off and walk barefoot once more, without restriction or fancy designs by someone else. Some got too tight, cutting off my circulation with their pointy-toed sharp looks; some became floppy, loose and I fell out of them because they made no sense to me; some were heavy and I felt that I couldn’t walk on my own path at all. All were valued for the temporary support they provided in various ways, but not for me to wear long-term. I learned about beauty with pain, about fluidity within form and function, about structural support limiting freedom. Not in struggle against them were they valued but because I experienced or witnessed the joy they brought to those wearing them quite happily as they walked with compassion. I just needed to be barefoot in my own spirituality. Indeed, as the author writes in Ozark Folk Magic:

Ozarks foundation is based upon the intimate connection between the individual and the natural world. It’s this connection that originally gave rise to the stereotypes of hillfolk or ‘hillbillies’, as a wild, primitive, and shoeless people.

And Gaia has supported me every step along this path, always kind. As long as I continue to honor the gifts of those spiritual paths traveled by others, respect their beauty and depths, and the love within the mysteries and stories they hold so dear, I know all is well. I feel peace in the exploration.

Gaia has many faces and places. And, for me, She is here within and everywhere I walk feeling the earth beneath my feet, the wind in my hair, the sun on my skin, and the rain cooling my face. Her smile is infinity, and we won’t be fenced in.

Gayatri Mantra – Devasya

Continuing my journey through the Gayatri / GaiaTree Mantra …

Devasya — definitions or understandings of the actual word/sound are:

quality (guna), attribute, function,

individual qualities of the Divine that manifest

_______________

To acknowledge the glorious and varied qualities of the Divine is to affirm the Unity of All as Divine. 

Celebrate diversity and honor the Divine for all manners of being, doing, becoming and transition are of Her. 

I love this sound–Devasya–flowing like the rivers of Her birthing waters that fill our world with love and infinite varieties of form and function. Our biodiversity here in Mother Earth is one part of the whole of the Universe of Diversity and we cannot even grasp the complexity of how all is interrelated, though we try to understand Her Great Mystery and all our roles that resonate back to the original Song of Love. We live in the harmonies and dissonance of function that needs to be recalled into the whole of Spirit to be at peace universally, or even just globally. 

All my thoughts become the manifest reality and when I imagine, the abundance of energy that pours through creation is minuscule compared to the imagination of Gaia. Look at all the diversity into which we are wholly integrated. Magnificent. 

Our perspective is one of duality because matter expresses through contrast. We could not know the gifts of Light without the Dark presents, could not survive with only Light in the manifest world. 

Our major opposites of the perceived gunas are simple and only the tip of the iceberg as we begin to understand the diversity of function and role within our manifest world. Here and now is where we experience the Divine — She is everywhere with open arms and gentle smile to soothe as we stumble and to encourage our footsteps on our unique paths of discovery, for see how we are all different, all growing at different paces. 

We are contained within the greater cell of world form and know galaxies whirling within our own cells of these body temples. And all life is this! Just this — the incredible diversity of Divine imagination, evolving, transforming, falling and dying, to be reborn into ourselves every moment. We are the transcendent experiencing immanence and it is a beautiful, wondrous mystery, is it not? 

I cannot contain the effervescence of the knowledge of diversity in all its wonders. I begin to think of it, feel Her energies, see every speck of creation grow with light and expand, and I am bursting with joy, gratitude, amazement and awe. The way in which all these qualities blend and divide and multiply is truly Divine. Each quality becomes entwined with another. 

We break our understanding into bits and pieces to try and comprehend the magic, and to explore, yet we mustn’t forget to put them back together, allow the bits to merge, interconnect, unify as is their very nature and the heart of the Divine. This is a trap we have often fallen into — to see the pieces and forget that they are part of the whole of Gaia, every single spark necessary to the fire of life if we are to experience the wonder of Unity here and now. 

Our future is not set. We can become new forms and lose this one if we continue without care for the whole. And maybe that is all part of Her gift of free expression as we choose our paths … on a grander scale than we can conceive, She moves in and out of becoming, breathing, sleeping, dying to one world and waking to another, different blends of qualities. Will She ever know abiding Love and Peace in Her world of form? The grand experience of life continues always … changing.