On the lookout.

 Just a quick note this week. . . Although we can never fully know the impact our work as contemplatives on the wisdom path has in our lives and in the world, we can be on the lookout for the ways it is manifesting tangibly.
 
 Not only must we receive the spiritual substances, virtues and fruit [mercy, trust, courage, forgiveness, humility, faith, hope, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, perseverance, gentleness, self-control, etc.] from beyond and bestow them in this world, we must come under their influence as well.
 
 We too must relax, soften, yield, enliven, cohere, and grow under their sway.
 
 How are you noticing your life alchemizing under their influence? How are others noticing the way you are showing up in the world under their sway?
 
 With Love,
 Heather

Here the Readings from this week's pauses:
 
 “There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
 
 ‘A Small Green Island’ by Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks
 
 There is a small green island
 where one white cow lives alone, a meadow of an island.
 
 The cow grazes until nightfall, full and fat,
 but during the night she panics
 and grows as thing as a single hair.
 What shall I eat tomorrow? There is nothing left.
 By dawn the grass has grown up again, waist-high.
 The cow starts eating and by dark
 the meadow is clipped short.
 
 She is full of strength and energy, but she panics
 in the dark as before and grows abnormally thin overnight.
 The cow does this over and over,
 and this is all she does.
 
 She never thinks, The meadow has never failed
 to grow back. Why should I be afraid every night
 that it won't. The cow is the bodily soul.
 The island field is the world where that grows
 lean with fear and fat with blessing, lean and fat.
 
 White cow, don't make yourself miserable.
 with what's to come, or not to come.
 
 
 'The Invitation' by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
 
 It doesn't interest me
 what you do for a living.
 I want to know
 what you ache for
 and if you dare to dream
 of meeting your heart's longing.
 
 It doesn't interest me
 how old you are.
 I want to know
 if you will risk
 looking like a fool
 for love
 for your dream
 for the adventure of being alive.
 
 It doesn’t interest me
 what planets are
 squaring your moon...
 I want to know
 if you have touched
 the centre of your own sorrow
 if you have been opened
 by life's betrayals
 or have become shrivelled and closed
 from fear of further pain.
 
 I want to know
 if you can sit with pain
 mine or your own
 without moving to hide it
 or fade it
 or fix it.
 
 I want to know
 if you can be with joy
 mine or your own
 if you can dance with wildness
 and let the ecstasy fill you
 to the tips of your fingers and toes
 without cautioning us
 to be careful
 to be realistic
 to remember the limitations
 of being human.
 
 It doesn't interest me
 if the story you are telling me
 is true.
 I want to know if you can
 disappoint another
 to be true to yourself.
 If you can bear
 the accusation of betrayal
 and not betray your own soul.
 If you can be faithless
 and therefore trustworthy.
 
 I want to know if you can see Beauty
 even when it is not pretty
 every day.
 And if you can source your own life
 from its presence.
 
 I want to know
 if you can live with failure
 yours and mine
 and still stand at the edge of the lake
 and shout to the silver of the full moon,
 "Yes."
 
 It doesn't interest me
 to know where you live
 or how much money you have.
 I want to know if you can get up
 after the night of grief and despair
 weary and bruised to the bone
 and do what needs to be done
 to feed the children.
 
 It doesn't interest me
 who you know
 or how you came to be here.
 I want to know if you will stand
 in the centre of the fire
 with me
 and not shrink back.
 
 It doesn't interest me
 where or what or with whom
 you have studied.
 I want to know
 what sustains you
 from the inside
 when all else falls away.
 
 I want to know
 if you can be alone
 with yourself
 and if you truly like
 the company you keep
 in the empty moments.
 
 
 “Every year, across the Atlantic Ocean, a prestigious procession of siliceous shells or frustules belonging to dead and ancient freshwater diatoms, whipped up by fierce Saharan winds in North Africa, travels westward from the Bodélé Depression (considered the driest and dustiest place on earth) to the Americas. This ghostly river of dust – visible from space – curls around the planet like a brown sequined pashmina shawl stretched across a glowing blue orb, eventually depositing its nutrient-rich contents in the hungry Amazon rainforest.
 
 The stunning implication of this planetary exercise isn’t lost on climate scientists and atmospheric chemists who study this yearly ritual closely: without this migrant sea of precious dust spilling from the shores of Africa, from the dead womb of the carcass of the once mighty Lake Mega Chad, the Amazon – a leaching system characterized by the constancy of heavy rainfall that washes away nutrient-rich soil – cannot supply the planet with oxygen.
 
 These silicon coffins play an enormous role in the world’s photosynthesis, shaping our lives whether we notice or not. Coming to think about this delicate (and largely invisible) work takes one’s breath away: we cannot breathe without the prolific generativity of the dead. Perhaps no other planet-wide vocation strikes such an immaculate balance between loss and generosity, between desolation and abundance, and between death and life. This is the stuff of worship.
 
 It would seem then that even death has an afterlife, and that even desolation is not completely itself all by itself in a processual, relational world.
 
 Boundaries migrate; essences flail and become threadbare in the fierce kino-political winds of movement; continents break and spill into each other, carried by counterhegemonic forces that mock neat borders and stable identities. Home is always bleeding, losing its way. Everything embarks. Everything ‘besides’ itself.
 
 That things tear open, fall apart, fade away, and fall to the ground might come across as a tale of absolute despair. Let the beautiful dance of cross-continental dust remind us that nothing is itself all by itself.” — Bayo Akomalafe
 
 “Origin is not time-bound, nor space-bound, but is the originator or source of all that is time and space bound. ‘We might say it is sheer presence,’ . . .’the itself,’ or ‘that’ which pervades or ‘shines through’ everything.” — Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World