Chelan Harkin: Approach Thirsty

This is one of the stunning poems from her third book, Wild Grace, that Chelan Harkin read when my husband and I saw her on April 12th. Chelan's poetry, courage and wisdom, and deep and courageous heart touches my heart and soul so deeply and is now captivating increasing numbers of people worldwide. So needed and such a gift. Blessed be. 🙏💗 Molly

Chelan speaking at New Thought Center for Spiritual Living, Lake Oswego, OR. April 12th, 2024

Approach Thirsty

Lately I've been praying to Muhammad,

Moses, Krishna,  Buddha, Baha'u'llah, Zoroaster, Jesus―

why be choosy?

I ask any source of true love

and great joy

to throw me as many bones

as they might.

Sometimes I pray to Mozart, Bach or Galileo

to pour music or the stars

through me.

Often I pray to Tahirih,

a great Persian poet and feminist

of the 1800's who would remove

her veil when addressing men

and was martyred

for speaking the irrepressible truth

in her heart.

Her final words were,

"You can kill me as soon as you like,

but you will never stop

the emancipation of women."

I often ask Hafez for a dance

and we go for the most poetic whirls.

Sometimes I ask Rumi

that he pluck me an ancient,

everblooming rose

and I crush its scent

onto the page.

I have a crush on Kahlil Gibran

and ask that he pass me

inspired love notes.

I pray to Harriet Tubman,

that queen of heroism,

for courage

and to Einstein

for out of this world

ideas.

Inspiration is not elitist.

There is no muse

that is off limits,

no genius you should not approach

and ask to be yours.

Oh, beseech whoever you might

that the master keys

that open all hearts

are put in your care,

that your particularly necessary style of expression 

may open new portals of beauty

to the eyes of the world.

Hobnob with all the great

dead poets,

thinkers

lovers,

artists,

heroes of justice,

leaders of truth.

They still want a place

to pour their wonder

into the world,

and you are a worthy vessel.

It's an open bar in the sky.

Approach thirsty,

and ask!

― Chelan Harkin

From Wild Grace

Chelan Harkin: The Worst Thing We Ever Did

Photo by Molly

The Worst Thing We Ever Did

The worst thing we ever did
was put God in the sky
out of reach

pulling the divinity
from the leaf,
sifting out the holy from our bones,
insisting God isn’t bursting dazzlement
through everything we’ve made
a hard commitment to see as ordinary,
stripping the sacred from everywhere
to put in a cloud man elsewhere,
prying closeness from your heart.

The worst thing we ever did
was take the dance and the song
out of prayer
made it sit up straight
and cross its legs
removed it of rejoicing
wiped clean its hip sway,
its questions,
its ecstatic yowl,
its tears.

The worst thing we ever did is pretend
God isn’t the easiest thing
in this Universe
available to every soul
in every breath.

― Chelan Harkin

From Susceptible  To Light

Brian Doyle: Love Is the Story and the Prayer That Matters Most

Photo by Molly

Quotes from Brian Doyle

We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.

Your library is where the community stores its treasures. It’s the house that imagination built. It’s where all the stories that matter are gathered together and celebrated and shared... People come to it communally for something that’s deep and ancient and important beyond an easy explanation. Who you are as a town is in the library. It’s why when you want to destroy a place you burn down the library. People who fear freedom fear libraries.

The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.

But you cannot control everything... All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference... You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow... That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.

Love is the story and the prayer that matters most.

— Brian Doyle

Father Richard Rohr: All Great Spirituality Is About What We Do With Our Pain

Wisdom Quotes 

from Father Richard Rohr

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmute it to those around us.

The journey never happens alone.

A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.

I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others.

Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.

We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.

Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You'll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism "thinking" (whereas it's really your ego's narcissistic reaction to the moment). You'll position things to quickly as inferior or superior, "with me" or "against me," and most of the time you'll be wrong.

If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God!

If unconditional love, loyalty, and obedience are the tickets to an eternal life, then my black Labrador, Venus, will surely be there long before me, along with all the dear animals in nature who care for their young at great cost to themselves and have suffered so much at the hands of humans.

It has been acceptable for some time in America to remain "wound identified" (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to "redeem the world," as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others.

You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody.

It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.

If our love of God does not directly influence, and even change, how we engage in the issues of our time on this earth, I wonder what good religion is.

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate.

The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.

You cannot be naïve about evil. You cannot be naïve to the reality that there are human beings and human situations which have totally identified with the dark side of reality. They are malicious. Realism teaches you to put up appropriate boundaries so that people can't do any more evil than possible. But that doesn't mean you do evil back to them.

We cannot avoid the globalization of knowledge and information. When I was a boy growing up in Kansas, I could never think about a Buddhist, or a Hindu, or Muslim, or even a Protestant - I grew up in such a Catholic ghetto. That's not possible anymore, unless you live in a cave or something. So either we have knowledge of what the other religions and other denominations are saying, and how they tie into the common thread, or we end up just being dangerously ignorant of other people and therefore prejudiced.

Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.

You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and a willingness to not know-and not even need to know. This ever widens and deepens your perspective. This is how you allow and encounter Mystery and move into the contemplative zone.

Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.

Spirituality is about being ready. All the spiritual disciplines of your life — prayer, study, meditation or ritual, religious vows — are there so you can break through to the eternal. Spirituality is about awakening the eyes, the ears, the heart so you can see what's always happening right in front of you.

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.

The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.

Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here.

Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through!

Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.

There is a part of you that is Love itself, and that is what we must fall into. It is already there. Once you move your identity to that level of deep inner contentment, you will realize you are drawing upon a Life that is much larger than your own and from a deeper abundance.

The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine - that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they're talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.

There is no path to peace, but peace itself is the path.

https://cac.org/about/our-teachers/richard-rohr/

Pema Chödrön: Moving Beyond Self-Protection

Photo by Molly

Moving Beyond Self-Protection

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is, we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet when we don't close off and we let our hearts break open, we discover our kinship with all beings.

— Pema Chödrön

From When Things Fall Apart

and 

The Pocket Pema Chödrön

Chelan Harkin: In This Era Of Human Evolution This Life Is About Alchemy

 This is so beautiful, wise, and true. 

— Molly

Photo by Molly

In This Era Of Human Evolution 

This Life Is About Alchemy

There’s a reason we’re all not awakened earth angels. The reason is we’re in a self-induced narcotic state of dissociation to avoid the immense pain from a long unencountered history stored in our bodies. We need a culture of moving toward our pain rather than away from it. We need to help hold each other as we move through it. We are both the midwives and the wailing mothers and as we truthfully, humbly, responsibly encounter ourselves and burn through the past we birth the new world. Don’t think this life is about feeling good. In this era of human evolution this life is about alchemy, about turning the old material inside of us that has long been used for war into purest gold.

— Chelan Harkin

Chelan Harkin To Speak Friday, April 12th In Lake Oswego

 I'm so exited to see and meet Chelan Harkin 

tomorrow at this event outside Portland.

Both my husband and I are going.

Hopefully I will see some of you

there, too! Yay!

💜 Molly

Jayne Relaford Brown: Finding Her Here

Photo by Molly

Finding Her Here

I am becoming the woman I've wanted,

grey at the temples,

soft body, delighted,

cracked up by life

with a laugh that's known bitter

but, past it, got better,

knows she's a survivor-

that whatever comes,

she can outlast it.

I am becoming a deep

weathered basket.

I am becoming the woman I've longed for,

the motherly lover

with arms strong and tender,

the growing daughter

who blushes surprises.

I am becoming full moons

and sunrises.

I find her becoming,

this woman I've wanted,

who knows she'll encompass,

who knows she's sufficient,

knows where she's going

and travels with passion.

Who remembers she's precious,

but knows she's not scarce-

who knows she is plenty,

plenty to share.

— Jayne Relaford Brown 

In Honor of Jane Goodall On Her 90th Birthday

Happy 90th Birthday with the deepest gratitude and love to Jane Goodall! She is truly a national and international treasure. The difference she has made in her lifetime is profound. And these quotes are but a glimpse of Jane Goodall's wisdom and courage, her connection with the sacredness of life, her activism and strong voice of truth, and the immensity of the caring and beauty and love that she embodies. May this amazing woman inspire us all! 🙏💜 Molly

We Have the Choice to Use the Gift of 

Our Life to Make the World a Better Place 

— or Not to Bother

Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.

Most of us don't realize the difference we could make. We love to shrug off our own responsibilities, to point fingers at others. "Surely," we say, "the pollution, waste, and other ills are not our fault. They are the fault of the industry, business, science. They are the fault of the politicians," This leads to a destructive and potentially deadly apathy. 

The greatest danger to our future is apathy.

Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?

Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?

Cultural speciation had been crippling to human moral and spiritual growth. It had hindered freedom of thought, limited our thinking, imprisoned us in the cultures into which we had been born. . . . These cultural mind prisons. . . . Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the ‘global village’ we would propagate prejudice and ignorance. 

How can you stop yourself from yelling and shouting and accusing everyone of cruelty? The easy answer is that the aggressive approach simply doesn't work.

Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our true potential.  

* * * * * 

The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves. 

In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.

Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.

If we do not do something to help these creatures, we make a mockery of the whole concept of justice. 

Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.

* * * * *

Michael Pollan likens consumer choices to pulling single threads out of a garment. We pull a thread from the garment when we refuse to purchase eggs or meat from birds who were raised in confinement, whose beaks were clipped so they could never once taste their natural diet of worms and insects. We pull out a thread when we refuse to bring home a hormone-fattened turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. We pull a thread when we refuse to buy meat or dairy products from cows who were never allowed to chew grass, or breathe fresh air, or feel the warm sun on their backs.

 
The more threads we pull, the more difficult it is for the industry to stay intact. You demand eggs and meat without hormones, and the industry will have to figure out how it can raise farm animals without them. Let the animals graze outside and it slows production. Eventually the whole thing will have to unravel.

 
If the factory farm does indeed unravel — and it must — then there is hope that we can, gradually, reverse the environmental damage it has caused. Once the animal feed operations have gone and livestock are once again able to graze, there will be a massive reduction in the agricultural chemicals currently used to grow grain for animals. And eventually, the horrendous contamination caused by animal waste can be cleaned up. None of this will be easy.

 
The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one.

* * * * *   

We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.

Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.

We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.

And if we dare to look into those eyes, then we shall feel their suffering in our hearts. More and more people have seen that appeal and felt it in their hearts. All around the world there is an awakening of understanding and compassion, and understanding that reaches out to help the suffering animals in their vanishing homelands. That embraces hungry, sick, and desperate human beings, people who are starving while the fortunate among us have so much more than we need. And if, one by one, we help them, the hurting animals, the desperate humans, then together we shall alleviate so much of the hunger, fear, and pain in the world. Together we can bring change to the world, gradually replacing fear and hatred with compassion and love. Love for all living beings. 

It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behavior. 

You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

We still have a long way to go. But we are moving in the right direction. If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution — and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity.

There is a powerful force unleashed when young people resolve to make a change.

So, let us move forward with faith in ourselves, in our intelligence, in our indomitable spirit. Let us develop respect for all living things. Let us try to replace violence and intolerance with understanding and compassion and love. 

— Jane Goodall

https://janegoodall.org/

Donella Meadows: There Is Too Much Bad News To Justify Complacency. There Is Too Much Good News To Justify Despair

 

We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective.

Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture. We've got to have an "enough." Always ask growth of what, and why, and for whom, and who pays the cost, and how log can it last, and what's the cost to the planet, and how much is enough?

People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment.

Addiction is finding a quick and dirty solution to the symptom of the problem, which prevents or distracts one from the harder and longer-term task of solving the real problem.

The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological–social–psychological–economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch. 

* * * * *

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.

If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency.

You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays.

Stop looking for who’s to blame; instead you’ll start asking, “What’s the system?” The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior.

The systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and • hone our abilities to understand parts, • see interconnections, • ask “what-if ” questions about possible future behaviors, and • be creative and courageous about system redesign.

* * * * *

Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.

There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

We can't impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.

Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure.

We know a tremendous amount about how the world works, but not nearly enough. Our knowledge is amazing; our ignorance even more so. We can improve our understanding, but we can't make it perfect.

Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own. Instead of becoming a champion for one possible explanation or hypothesis or model, collect as many as possible. Consider all of them to be plausible until you find some evidence that causes you to rule one out. That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption that may become entangled with your own identity.

* * * * *

The most damaging example of the systems archetype called “drift to low performance” is the process by which modern industrial culture has eroded the goal of morality. The workings of the trap have been classic, and awful to behold. Examples of bad human behavior are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical. This is just what you would expect. After all, we’re only human. 

The far more numerous examples of human goodness are barely noticed. They are “not news.” They are exceptions. Must have been a saint. Can’t expect everyone to behave like that. And so expectations are lowered. 

The gap between desired behavior and actual behavior narrows. Fewer actions are taken to affirm and instill ideals. The public discourse is full of cynicism. Public leaders are visibly, unrepentantly amoral or immoral and are not held to account. Idealism is ridiculed. Statements of moral belief are suspect. It is much easier to talk about hate in public than to talk about love.

* * * * *

Let's face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That's what makes the world interesting, that's what makes it beautiful, and that's what makes it work.

A vision should be judged by the clarity of its values, not the clarity of its implementation path.

No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

Sustainability is a new idea to many people, and many find it hard to understand. But all over the world there are people who have entered into the exercise of imagining and bringing into being a sustainable world. They see it as a world to move toward not reluctantly, but joyfully, not with a sense of sacrifice, but a sense of adventure. A sustainable world could be very much better than the one we live in today.

Rules for sustainability, like every workable social rule, would be put into place not to destroy freedoms, but to create freedoms or to protect them. A ban on bank robbing inhibits the freedom of the thief in order to assure that everyone else has the freedom to deposit and withdraw money safely. A ban on overuse of a renewable resource or on the generation of a dangerous pollutant protects vital freedoms in a similar way.

God grant us the serenity to exercise our bounded rationality freely in the systems that are structured appropriately, the courage to restructure the systems that aren’t, and the wisdom to know the difference!

There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.

— Donna Meadows