A Friend is Someone Who Knows Your Song and Sings It to You When You Have Forgotten It

© M&H Sheppard

 They're Singing Your Song

from a story told by Alan Cohen

in his book Wisdom Of The Heart
  

When a woman in a certain African tribe knows she is pregnant, she goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they pray and meditate until they hear the song of the child. They recognize that every soul has its own vibration that expresses its unique flavor and purpose. When the women attune to the song, they sing it out loud. Then they return to the tribe and teach it to everyone else.
 

When the child is born, the community gathers and sings the child's song to him or her. Later, when the child enters education, the village gathers and chants the child's song. When the child passes through the initiation to adulthood, the people again come together and sing. At the time of marriage, the person hears his or her song.
 

Finally, when the soul is about to pass from this world, the family and friends gather at the person's bed, just as they did at their birth, and they sing the person to the next life.

To the African tribe, there is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child. If at any time during his or her life the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, the person is called to the center of the village and the people form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them.
 

The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment; it is love and the remembrance of identity. When you recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another.
 

A friend is someone who knows your song and sings it to you when you have forgotten it. Those who love you are not fooled mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.
 

You may not have grown up in an African tribe that sings your song to you at crucial life transitions, but life is always reminding you when you are in tune with yourself and when you are not. When you feel good, what you are doing matches your song, and when you feel awful, it doesn't. In the end, we shall all recognize our song and sing it well.
 

You may feel a little warbly at the moment, but so have all the great singers. Just keep singing and you'll find your way home.
 

http://www.inspirationpeak.com/shortstories/singingyoursong.html  

Pema Chödrön: Let the Things That Enter Your Life Wake You Up

Life's work is to wake up, to let the things that enter your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and teach you what it will. It's going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate. You can leave your marriage, you can quit your job, you can only go where people are going to praise you, you can manipulate your world until you are blue in the face to try to make it always smooth, but the same old demons will always come up until finally you have learned your lesson, the lesson they came here to teach you. Then those same demons will appear as friendly, warmhearted companions on the path.

  

  - Pema Chödrön

Over and Over Tune

Over And Over Tune

 

You could grow into it,
that sense of living like a dog,
loyal to being on your own in the fur of your skin,
able to exist only for the sake of existing.

 

Nothing inside your head lasting long enough for you to hold onto,
you watch your own thoughts leap across your own synapses and disappear --
small boats in a wind,
fliers in all that blue,

the swish of an arm backed with feathers,
a dress talking in a corner,

and then poof,

your mind clean as a dog's,
your body big as the world,

important with accident --

blood or a limp, fur and paws.

 

You swell into survival,

you take up the whole day,
you're all there is,

everything else is
not you, is every passing glint, is

shadows brought to you by wind,

passing into a bird's cheep, replaced by a

rabbit skittering across a yard,
a void you yourself fall into.

 

You could make this beautiful,

but you don't need to,
living is this fleshy side of the bone,

going on is this medicinal smell of the sun --

no dog ever tires of seeing his life

 

keep showing up at the back door
even as a rotting bone with a bad smell;
feet tottering, he dreams of it,
wakes and licks no matter what.

~ Ioanna Carlsen ~

 

(Poetry, March 2001)

 

 

Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Over_and_Over_Tune.html

Thich Nhat Hanh: You Are Like a Candle

 You are like a candle.  

Imagine you are sending light out all around you. 
All your words, thoughts and actions are going in many directions. 

If you say something kind, your kind words go in many directions, 

and you yourself go with them.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

from  Thich Nhat Hanh gems  

Giving from the Heart

♥

from Alanna Chasin, aka The Dog Buddha

Patricia Lynn Reilly: Imagine a Woman

Image by Elizabeth Gibbons

 This is so powerful. I had Imagine a Woman framed up on my wall for

many years. It helped me to imagine.... and gradually, over time, become... 
This is such an amazing intention to hold. Blessed be. ♥ Molly

 ********

IMAGINE A WOMAN

Imagine a woman who believes it is right and good she is a woman. A woman who honors her experience and tells her stories.
Who refuses to carry the sins of others within her body and life.
Imagine a woman who trusts and respects herself.
A woman who listens to her needs and desires.
Who meets them with tenderness and grace.

Imagine a woman who acknowledges the past's influence on the present.
A woman who has walked through her past.
Who has healed into the present.

Imagine a woman who authors her own life.
A woman who exerts, initiates, and moves on her own behalf.
Who refuses to surrender except to her truest self and wisest voice.
Imagine a woman who names her own gods.
A woman who imagines the divine in her image and likeness.
Who designs a personal spirituality to inform her daily life.
Imagine a woman in love with her own body.
A woman who believes her body is enough, just as it is.
Who celebrates its rhythms and cycles as an exquisite resource.

Imagine a woman who honors the body of the Goddess in her changing body.
A woman who celebrates the accumulation of her years and her wisdom.
Who refuses to use her life-energy disguising the changes in her body and life.

Imagine a woman who values the women in her life.
A woman who sits in circles of women.
Who is reminded of the truth about herself when she forgets.

Imagine yourself as this woman. 

~© Patricia Lynn Reilly, 1995

from Wisdom of the Sacred Feminine

George Washington Carver: How Far You Go In Life

 

How far you go in life depends on you being tender with 

the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with 

the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. 

Because someday in life you will have been all of these.
 

- George Washington Carver (1864-1943),

botanist, agricultural chemist, inventor, and educator

 

from Charter for Compassion

Anais Nin: Courage

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

- Anais Nin

Naomi Shihab Nye: Kindness

KINDNESS

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.   

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness tht makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and

purchase bread,

   only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

it is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend. 

 

By Naomi Shihab Nye (born March 12, 1952) is a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and American mother. Although she regards herself as a "wandering poet", she refers to San Antonio as her home. She visited her grandmother in Palestine when she was 14, which gave her a whole new perspective on poetry) Poem from “Words Under the Words”