Beauty Unveiled

No matter the beauty perceived in your appearance,
know that the loveliest aspect of you
is found in your heart,
your spirit.

Some say these beauties cannot be seen,
cannot be photographed or painted,
but you wear this beauty on your physical being
the way a diaphonous veil drapes from a rounded breast,
clings along a curving hip,
layering one delightful texture on another,
so that the beauty of one
accents the other.

One beauty accents another: Unveiling the beauty of the soul.

The Crucible of Suffering: Pain

feeling the pain

feeling the pain

If you feel hatred, feel the anger that powers it.
If you feel anger, feel the fear that motivates it.
If you feel fear, feel the pain that underlies it.
If you feel pain, heal the part of you that feels it.
 
Pain is the crucible in which all suffering is smelted
Extinguish the fires that bring pain to boil
And the alloys of suffering cannot form
 
These fires are always internal
External factors may stoke them
But the fuel is always within

Choose Love

Hate is easy; love takes courage

Hate is easy
Love takes courage

When I choose to live in my fear, my anger, my hate
I see the world through eyes that fear
I hear the song of anger in every note
I taste hatred as if all sustenance were the bitterest root

In my mind
I place the world of power, control and duplicity
Above the world of beauty, compassion and love
So that all that is wrong exists in the world outside me
And the only course of correction, an expression of violence

It is not my fault
It is not my responsibility
It becomes right that I fear
That I am angry
That I hate

Then I am truly mired in my own pain, in my own suffering
From which even a utopia could not rescue me
For I could never perceive one
And would soon enough destroy it

One and All

It is through our perception of this realm of manifestation
And our will to reason about all we perceive
That we learn to believe in opposites.

Beauty & Ugliness
Love & Hatred
Good & Evil

Only words.
Only names for the unnameable.
The concepts they speak of,
Only manifestations of the eternally real.

By believing these words speak the final truth
We make their manifestations real.

We come to believe we are on thing, or another.
We come to believe we are separate.
We become prone to loneliness, fear, anger, hatred, violence.

But All are one
And One in all

No soul is ever alone.
But a manifestation knows loneliness
When it disconnects from its own soul,
Which is One & All.

There is always…

It has been said:

There’s always a little truth behind every “Just kidding”;
A little knowledge behind every: “I don’t know”;
A little emotion behind every: “I don’t care” and
A little pain behind every “It’s okay.”

This is true. Often, there is rather a lot. But it’s also true that,

There is always a little love in every smile;
A little compassion in every touch;
A little beauty in every being, and
A little courage in every moment.

And, often, there is rather a lot.

The Path of Becoming

Backward Glance by David Wright

Backward Glance
by David Wright

We are always changing,
But only to become ourselves.
What we leave behind was not ours.
What we carry forward is,
     if only for the moment.
 
Sometimes a backward glance clarifies
     what was,
          what remains,
               what will be.

The Way ~ when Nature plays its lovely hand

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.

~ George Washington Carver



When Lao Tse speaks of The Dao, he is referring literally to “The Way”. There’s no simple way to tell you what “The Way” is. Lao Tse wrote 81 poems to describe how to recognise The Dao at work, or how a master might behave in concert with The Way. These poems are collected in a single book called The Dao de Jing, or The Book of The Way. But even with this masterful explication, The Dao remains a rather elusive quality — or is it quantity? It’s hard to pin down. But if you understand even a little bit about The Dao, then I think you can see it at work most easily in nature, much as Sheryl Crow observes it in this song, Wildflower.
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Time Tables and Being out of Time

Time has been on my mind. Yes, because I’ve been reading (and just completed) The Time Traveller’s Wife, but also because time has long been on my mind. This song, Time Table, is an old, old example of time in my consciousness and subconscious. It’s a favourite of mine since I first bought the album, Genesis’ Foxtrot, from a department store cutout bin in the mid ’70s. I think it cost me $1.99, and I recall buying it primarily for the visual qualities of the cover — unusual, evocative, strange, alluring. The music was no less so, for the qualities of its ‘sound’, the depth and complexity of its composition, and for the lyrics which transported me far, far away from the rural New Hampshire resort town I lived in. I loved it immediately. Still do. Perhaps I always will (and always have.)
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