Hafiz

All the Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.

Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season

Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.

Make a new water-mark on your excitement

And love.

Like a blooming night flower,

Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness

And giving

Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence

Lie beside an equator

In your heart.

Greet Yourself

In your thousand other forms

As you mount the hidden tide and travel

Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven

Are sitting around a fire

Chatting

While stitching themselves together

Into the Great Circle inside of

You.

From: 'The Subject Tonight is Love'

Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

The leaf has a song in it....

What Can I Say

 

What can I say that I have not said before? 

So I'll say it again. 

The leaf has a song in it. 

Stone is the face of patience. 

Inside the river there is an unfinishable story 

and you are somewhere in it 

and it will never end until all ends.

 

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the 

chamber of commerce 

but take it also to the forest. 

The song you heard singing in the leaf when you 

were a child 

is singing still. 

I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, 

and the leaf is singing still.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(Swan)

 

Story Water

[STORY WATER]

-Rumi
A story is like water
that you heat for your bath.

It takes messages between the fire
and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!

Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself
like a salamander or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.

A feeling of fullness comes,
but usually it takes some bread
to bring it.

Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.

The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
the light that's blazing
inside your presence.

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what's hidden.

Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.

A thought with the coffee...

New post from Michael

Here's my friend Michael's thoughts on deep listening, a summery reflection of presence of self to another, and self to oneself.

http://www.herosjourneyfoundation.org/blog/?p=487

Fluent- By John O'Donohue

I would love to live / Like a river flows / Carried by the surprise / Of its own unfolding. 

Thoughts from a friend- Michael's blog post about The Art of Listening Deeply

http://www.herosjourneyfoundation.org/blog/?p=474

Here is the art of listening deeply- how to listen to another, and how to listen to self.

"When I reflect on the fact of whether or not I know that I am loved, I cannot undertake that possibility without coming to the rather definitive conclusion that being loved feels much like being listened to, deeply.

When I speak something of personal meaning or significance to another, particularly as I feel my own personal nature or feeling being revealed to another, I feel exposed. I am vulnerable as myself, being revealed. It is in these moments that I am immediately aware of how it feels when the other can hear what it is I am saying. It is the distinctive feeling of being received; it is like the other can take a sip from the cup from which I have been drinking."