Daily Thoughts

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. Carl Sagan   The Upanishads are one of the main sources of Vedic wisdom. The word Upanishad means something like 'sitting down at the feet (or source) of the knowledge.'...

Everything that was broken has forgotten its brokenness. I live now in a sky-house, through every  window the sun. Also your presence. Our touching, our stories. Earthy and holy both. How can this be, but  it is. Every day has something in  it whose name is Forever. Mary Oliver, Everything That was Broken, from the...

2% of mind is thought. 98% is the truth of you: silence. David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D   For years, my mind was filled with thought. Always. As if I were at the center of a maelstrom of voices, none of them pleasant, all of them speaking in...

Your great mistake is to act the drama
 as if you were alone. As if life
 were a progressive and cunning crime
 with no witness to the tiny hidden
 transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
 the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
 even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
 the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
 out your solo voice. You must note
 the way the soap dish enables you,
 or the window latch grants you freedom.
 Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
 The stairs are your mentor of things
 to come, the doors have always been there
 to frighten you and invite you,
 and the tiny speaker in the phone
 is your dream-ladder to divinity.
 
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
 conversation. The kettle is singing
 even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
 have left their arrogant aloofness and
 seen the good in you at last. All the birds
 and creatures of the world are unutterably
 themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
by David Whyte, Everything Is Waiting For You
 
In an interview with Krista Tippet, On Being, the ‘poet philosopher’ David Whyte says, “Poetry is language against which you have no defences.”
 
This poem hits me that way. And I am so grateful to it and the author for a momentary reason and a way not to listen to the voices of ‘alone’ in my head, so that I might hear the insistence of the universe asking me to ‘Wake up! Notice!’
 
Today I will get present to something—to the grey of the sky, the bite of the cold wind, the sad eyes of the grocery store clerk—and notice for myself if there might be poetry in it. If it might possibly be seen as evidence of the existence of the Divine.
Our Last Night in the downtown Studio, DTPC, LA CA

One regret, dear world, That I am determined not to have When I am lying on my deathbed Is that I did not kiss you enough. Hafiz, from I Heard God Laughing, translated by Daniel Ladinsky   One way to enlightenment? Love. Love everything, all the time. This is what David Hawkins advises. This...

Vedanta claims that the human soul is divine, and that all this that we see around us is the outcome of that consciousness of the divine. Everything that is strong and good and powerful in human nature is the outpouring of that divinity, and though...

It is not for the sake of the husband that the husband is loved, but for the sake of the Self that the husband is loved. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, (2.4.5)   Recently a friend said it was a great day when he realized that love did not require an object....

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be...