Mahatma Gandhi: A Mirror Reflection

What we are doing to the forests of the world is but 

a mirror reflection of what we are doing to 

ourselves and to one another. 

- Mahatma Gandhi
 

John O'Donohue: Befriending the Worlds That Come to Balance Within

If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person, or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.
 

― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Satish Kumar: Be Your Own Light

Whatever lessens suffering in yourself and others, that is right. Whatever increases suffering, that is wrong. The answer is within you. When you are free of pride and prejudice, when you are calm and attentive, a light will shine within you. Through meditation and through being mindful you will find your own knowledge of rightness. You will be your own light. 

  

― Satish Kumar, The Buddha and the Terrorist

John O'Donohue: When Our Eyes Are Graced With Wonder

When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.

― John O'Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

For An Addict: A Blessing

I share this beautiful and profound blessing by John O'Donohue for all those who actively struggle with addiction. Most of us know, and are even close with, someone who is being pulled under by the force of their attachment to something outside themselves. On some level, and to one degree or another, this can also be true for most of us. Years ago I read a book called When Society Becomes An Addict and was deeply struck with how our culture subtly but actively supports addiction in all its forms. It became clear that most of us fall somewhere on the continuum of being more or less addicted and more or less awake. Addiction wears many faces and can be defined as any consistent pattern of behavior and thinking that obstructs our healing, wholeness, presence, and being more fully who we truly are. These many faces can take the form of addiction to countless distractions, some more obvious and harmful than others: alcohol and drugs, shopping and accumulating stuff, starving or overeating, caretaking and codependency, religion and rigidity, racism and bigotry, projection and blame, exercise and work, sex and affairs, anger and abuse, judging and thinking, greed and all forms of violence, etc., etc. Today, not only am I 30 years into my recovery from substance addiction, I am also rooted into a lifelong journey of increasingly awakening to all that which distracts and disconnects me from myself, from you, from all beings, from this precious moment and this precious life I have been gifted. My continued prayer for us all is for deepening mindfulness, presence, compassion, connection. While addiction separates, the intention and commitment to awaken brings remembrance of what we have forgotten. May we all remember the beauty of our true nature, may we be healed, may our hearts remain open, may we know peace. 

Many blessings ~ Molly

 

For An Addict

A Blessing

On its way through the innocent night,

The moth is ambushed by the light,

Becomes glued to a window

Where a candle buns; its whole self,

Its dreams of flight and all desire

Trapped in one glazed gaze;

Now nothing else ca satisfy

But the deadly beauty of flame.

When you lose the feel

For all other belonging

And what is truly near

Becomes distant and ghostly,

And you are visited

And claimed by a simplicity

Sinister in its singularity,

No longer yourself, your mind

And will owned and steered

From elsewhere now,

You would sacrifice anything

To dance once more to the haunted

Music with your fatal beloved

Who owns the eyes of your heart.

These words of blessing cannot

Reach, even as echoes,

To the shore of where you are,

Yet may they work without you

To soften some slight line through

To the white cave where

Your soul is captive.

May some glimmer

Of outside light reach your eyes

To help you recognize how

You have fallen for a vampire.

May you crash hard and soon

Onto real ground again

Where this fundamentalist

Shell might start to crack

For you to hear

Again your own echo.

That your lost lonesome heart

Might learn to cry out

For the true intimacy

Of love that waits

To take you home

To where you are known

And seen and where

Your life is treasured

Beyond every frontier

Of despair you have crossed.

- John O’Donohue

To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

 

Satish Kumar: The Work of Eliminating Violence

We must realize that violence is not confined to physical violence. Fear is violence, caste discrimination is violence, exploitation of others, however subtle, is violence, segregation is violence, thinking ill of others and condemning others are violence. In order to reduce individual acts of physical violence, we must work to eliminate violence at all levels, mental, verbal, personal, and social, including violence to animals, plants, and all other forms of life.
 

― Satish Kumar, The Buddha and the Terrorist

Chris Jordan: When You Bring Beauty and Grief Together

One powerful elixir is beauty. There is nothing quite like beauty. When you bring beauty and grief together, you can't look at it, because it's so sad -- and you can't look away, because it's so beautiful. It's a moment of being transfixed, and the key is turned in the lock. 

- Chris Jordan

 http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#cig-butts

The Above by Chris Jordan is from  Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait:

Cigarette Butts, 2013     60x72"

Depicts 139,000 cigarette butts, equal to the number of cigarettes that are smoked 
and discarded every 15 seconds in the US. Cigarette butts are the number one 
littered item found in America’s public spaces including parks, beaches, waterways, 
and urban environments. This form of litter has far-reaching impacts on the 
environment: littered butts leach numerous toxic chemicals and carcinogens, 
contaminate water sources, and poison wildlife. The filters are made of cellulose 
acetate, a type of plastic that does not biodegrade.

MIDWAY: MESSAGE FROM 
THE GYRE (2009)

By © Chris Jordan, Photographic Arts

As my team and I prepare to travel back to Midway Atoll, I cannot help but note the macabre juxtaposition of the environmental disaster that is happening in the Pacific Ocean, with the one that is happening in the Gulf of Mexico. The two phenomena are oddly parallel, involving (among other grotesque features) the deaths of untold numbers of sea birds, caused by millions of tons of our petroleum products that have poured into the ocean via our collective negligence. And in each case the birds can be viewed as messengers, serving as one small warming signal of a much larger calamity, with global consequences, in which our individual consumer lifestyles are unavoidably complicit.

My friend the artist Richard Lang says the opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but indifference. 

For more, please go here: http://coastalcare.org/2010/08/midway-atoll-northwestern-end-of-the-hawaiian-archipelago/ 

Chris Jordan - Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption

Chris Jordan: Crushed cars #2, Tacoma 2004     44x62"

Exploring around our country's shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress. I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.
 

The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.
 

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.

- Chris Jordan

http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/intolerable/#about

Recycling Yard #6, Seattle 2004     44x59"

Pole Yard, Tacoma 2004     44x60"

Cell phones, Orlando 2004     44 x 82"

Don't Become Who Hurt You

My experience has been that certainly among life's greatest challenges is making a conscious choice of whether or not to be bitter. If we do not make this a conscious choice, we will likely be acting out our unconscious choice in ways that cause more harm than healing. Certainly among life's greatest callings is to learn the gifts of the alchemist - how to embrace, heal, transform the harm we have suffered from others, and from ourselves, and discover the hard-won gifts of wisdom, compassion, and deepened and mature love buried in our suffering. It is there. May we claim these precious gifts. 

Peace & blessings ~ Molly

Terry Tempest Williams: The World Is Holy

The world is holy. 

We are holy. All life is holy. 

Daily prayers are delivered on 

the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings 

of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.

― Terry Tempest Williams