Paulo Coelho: Wherever the Heart Is

Remember that wherever your heart is, 

there you will find your treasure.

― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

 

Reflections of Beauty

Each human personality is like a piece of music, 

having an individual tone and a rhythm of its own. 

 

- Hazrat Inayat Khan

 

The Key To All Change

When we change, the world changes. 

The key to all change is in our inner transformation

—a change of our hearts and minds. 

This is human revolution. 

We all have the power to change. 

When we realize this truth, 

we can bring forth that power anywhere, 

anytime, and in any situation.

 

— Daisaku Ikeda

 

from Deva Premal and Miten

John O'Donohue: For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past

Such an amazing gift it is to open our hearts and embrace
rather than run from our wounds.
Such a profound paradox it is to discover the joy that is found in walking 
through the doorway of our grief, shame, and fears.
Such a profound choice we all make, whether we are aware or not, 
to make friends with ourselves, to find the jewels hidden in dark places, 
to reunite with our banished heart. Or not.
Some are able to speak with amazing depth, eloquence, heartfelt
compassion and soulful wisdom that so beautifully
touches the beauty, the preciousness of this awakening.
Among them is John O'Donohue.

With deep tenderness and compassion for us all ~
Molly

For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past

For everything under the sun there is a time.
This is the season of your awkward harvesting,
When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,

Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place
You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;
And a time when that bitter tree was planted

That has grown always invisibly beside you
And whose branches your awakened hands
Now long to disentangle from your heart.

You are coming to see how your looking often darkened
When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,
How deep down your eyes were always owned by something

That faced them through a dark fester of thorns
Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;
You could only see what touched you as already torn.

Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.
And your memory is ready to show you everything,
Having waited all these years for you to return and know.

Only you know where the casket of pain is interred. 
You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering
And according to your readiness, everything will open. 

May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide
Who can accompany you through the fear and grief
Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.

As your tears fall over that wounded place,
May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.
May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound

So that for the first time you can walk away from that place, 
Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,
And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.

― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

 

John O'Donahue: Kindness

There is a kindness that dwells deep down in things; it presides everywhere, often in the places we least expect. The world can be harsh and negative, but if we remain generous and patient, kindness inevitably reveals itself. Something deep in the human soul seems to depend on the presence of kindness; something instinctive in us expects it, and once we sense it we are able to trust and open ourselves.

― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

  

Naomi Klein: The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face Are Not Just External

The climate crisis has such bad timing, confronting it not only requires a new economy but a new way of thinking.

Naomi Klein 

April 21, 2014  

(Reuters/China Daily)

This is a story about bad timing.

One of the most disturbing ways that climate change is already playing out is through what ecologists call “mismatch” or “mistiming.” This is the process whereby warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses.

The migration patterns of many songbird species, for instance, have evolved over millennia so that eggs hatch precisely when food sources such as caterpillars are at their most abundant, providing parents with ample nourishment for their hungry young. But because spring now often arrives early, the caterpillars are hatching earlier too, which means that in some areas they are less plentiful when the chicks hatch, threatening a number of health and fertility impacts. Similarly, in West Greenland, caribou are arriving at their calving grounds only to find themselves out of sync with the forage plants they have relied on for thousands of years, now growing earlier thanks to rising temperatures. That is leaving female caribou with less energy for lactation, reproduction and feeding their young, a mismatch that has been linked to sharp decreases in calf births and survival rates.

Scientists are studying cases of climate-related mistiming among dozens of species, from Arctic terns to pied flycatchers. But there is one important species they are missing—us. Homosapiens. We too are suffering from a terrible case of climate-related mistiming, albeit in a cultural-historical, rather than a biological, sense. Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude—that moment being the tail end of the go-go ’80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.

This deeply unfortunate mistiming has created all sorts of barriers to our ability to respond effectively to this crisis. It has meant that corporate power was ascendant at the very moment when we needed to exert unprecedented controls over corporate behavior in order to protect life on earth. It has meant that regulation was a dirty word just when we needed those powers most. It has meant that we are ruled by a class of politicians who know only how to dismantle and starve public institutions, just when they most need to be fortified and reimagined. And it has meant that we are saddled with an apparatus of “free trade” deals that tie the hands of policy-makers just when they need maximum flexibility to achieve a massive energy transition.

Confronting these various structural barriers to the next economy is the critical work of any serious climate movement. But it’s not the only task at hand. We also have to confront how the mismatch between climate change and market domination has created barriers within our very selves, making it harder to look at this most pressing of humanitarian crises with anything more than furtive, terrified glances. Because of the way our daily lives have been altered by both market and technological triumphalism, we lack many of the observational tools necessary to convince ourselves that climate change is real—let alone the confidence to believe that a different way of living is possible.

And little wonder: just when we needed to gather, our public sphere was disintegrating; just when we needed to consume less, consumerism took over virtually every aspect of our lives; just when we needed to slow down and notice, we sped up; and just when we needed longer time horizons, we were able to see only the immediate present.

This is our climate change mismatch, and it affects not just our species, but potentially every other species on the planet as well.

The good news is that, unlike reindeer and songbirds, we humans are blessed with the capacity for advanced reasoning and therefore the ability to adapt more deliberately—to change old patterns of behavior with remarkable speed. If the ideas that rule our culture are stopping us from saving ourselves, then it is within our power to change those ideas. But before that can happen, we first need to understand the nature of our personal climate mismatch.

Please continue this article from The Nation Magazine here: http://www.thenation.com/article/179460/change-within-obstacles-we-face-are-not-just-external.

John O'Donohue: For an Occasion of Celebration

FOR AN OCCASION OF CELEBRATION

Now is the time to free the heart,
Let all intentions and worries stop,
Free the joy inside the self,
Awaken to the wonder of your life.

Open your eyes and see the friends,
Whose hearts recognize your face as kin,
Those whose kindness watchful and near,
Encouraging you to live everything here.

See the gifts the years have given,
Things your effort could never earn,
The health to enjoy who you want to be
And the mind to mirror mystery.
 

- John O'Donohue 

 "To Bless The Space Between Us" ("Benedictus" in the U.K. and Europe)

from John O'Donohue

Chief Seattle: Web of Life

 For Earth Day and every day...

Humankind has not woven the web of life. 

We are but one thread within it. 

Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. 

All things are bound together … 

all things connect.

—Chief Seattle

 

John O'Donohue: Easter Sunrise at Corcomroe

We don’t realise all the good we can do. A kind encouraging word or a helping 

hand can bring many a person through dark valleys in their lives. 

We weren’t put here to make money or to acquire status or reputation. 

We were sent here to search for the light of Easter in our hearts and 

when we find it, we are meant to give it away generously.

The dawn that is rising this Easter morning is a gift to our hearts and 

we are meant to celebrate it and to carry away from this holy, ancient place 

the gifts of healing and light and the courage of a new beginning.” 

-- John O'Donohue, Easter Sunrise service at Corcomroe Abbey

from http://www.johnodonohue.com/easter-sunrise-at-corcomroe 

John O'Donohue: A Blessing for Beauty

A Blessing for Beauty

May the beauty of your life become more visible to you,

that you may glimpse your wild divinity.

May the wonders of the earth call you forth from all your small, secret prisons

and set your feet free in the pastures of possibilities.

May the light of dawn anoint your eyes that you may 

behold what a miracle a day is.

May the liturgy of twilight shelter all your fears and darkness 

within the circle of ease.

May the angel of memory surprise you in bleak times with new gifts

from the harvest of your vanished days.

May you allow no dark hand to quench 

the candle of hope in your heart.

May you discover a new generosity towards yourself, and encourage 

yourself to engage your life as a great adventure.

May the outside voices of fear and despair find no echo in you.

May you always trust the urgency and wisdom of your own spirit.

May the shelter and nourishment of all the good you have done, 

the love you have shown, the suffering you have carried,

awaken around you to bless your life a thousand times.

And when love finds the path to your door may you open

like the earth to the dawn, and trust your every hidden

color towards its nourishment of light.

May you find enough stillness and silence to savor 

the kiss of God on your soul and delight in the eternity

that shaped you, that holds you and calls you.

And may you know that despite confusion, anxiety and emptiness,

your name is written in Heaven.

And may you come to see your life as a quiet sacrament of service,

which awakens around you a rhythm where doubt gives way

to the grace of wonder, where what is awkward and strained can

find elegance, and where crippled hope can find wings, and

torment enter at last unto the grace of serenity.

May Divine Beauty bless you.

- John O’Donohue, from Beauty – The Invisible Embrace