Phyllis Edgerly Ring's Blog, page 24
August 20, 2015
The rugged road to blessings
GLEANINGS FOUND HERE AND THERE:
Photo: Lara Kearns
We are all of us searching for love, for the intimacy, closeness, tenderness we may remember from when we were in our mother’s arms or may have glimpsed in a lover’s embrace. Or we may know it just as a sense of something we always wanted, something missing from our life.
This love is at the core of our being, and yet we search for it everywhere, so often causing our self pain in the process, losing our way, becoming entangled in our desires and all our images of love.
Then, one day, something makes us turn away from the outer world to seek this truth within us.
Photo: Lara Kearns
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter.
It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow.
Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
~ Rumi
Photo: Lara Kearns
The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.
… To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace.
Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.
~ Terry Tempest Williams
August 17, 2015
The glorious leap awaiting us
Image: EnochsVision.com
Humanity is on the verge of a spiritual evolutionary leap into a future where lasting global peace is not only possible but inevitable.
The human family is moving toward this stage of spiritual maturity through a dawning recognition of the oneness and interrelatedness in which it has been created, together with all of creation, and through the release of the gems of spiritual potential that await expression in every human heart.
As human beings, we’re held back in this process to the degree that we lack understanding about our true identity and purpose.
All around us, we can see the ways in which this lack of understanding has reached a state of desperation that is reflected in disastrous consequences at every level of human relationship.
As souls gain awareness and understanding of our truest identity and purpose, humanity will come to understand that the forces at work in human life are impelling us away from a centuries-old preoccupation with survival and “fighting evil” towards our highest destiny: a creative, collaborative and potentially limitless building of the good, in which every individual has a part to play and every culture its unique contributions to make. 
Explore these and related themes in With Thine Own Eyes: Why Imitate the Past When We Can Investigate Reality?
Learn more at:
Print version at: http://www.bahairesources.com/with-thine-own-eyes.html
August 14, 2015
Beneath and between the facts
Photo: Suzanne Birdsall-Stone
As I’ve been pondering the power and effectiveness of wholeness in healing, and in living, I find these words of writer Ian Lawton’s instructive:
“Your body’s wisdom is instinct. Your heart’s wisdom is emotion. Your mind’s wisdom is knowledge. Your higher self’s wisdom is intuition. Intuition works with, beneath and between the facts.”
I’ve appreciated his Soulseeds blog for some time now. He describes there how the multiple kinds of knowing with which we’re endowed work most effectively when they are used together.
He notes: “Being informed is necessary. Being intelligent is helpful. Being wise is essential. Wisdom is a deft combination of multiple intelligences.
Photo: Suzanne Birdsall-Stone
“IQ is head smart. Emotional intelligence (EQ) understands the feelings behind facts. This is heart smart. Spiritual intelligence (SQ) is the mind’s meaning maker. It connects IQ and EQ by discerning what is significant and why. This is where moral intelligence comes from, as well as a sense of purpose. Another name for SQ is wisdom. Wisdom is street smart. It has its own way of knowing that combines all your years of experience and marshals the best team of feelings, skills and knowledge for each occasion.”
I encourage reading the rest of this post, and exploring the resource of Ian’s thoughtful blog at: http://www.soulseeds.com/grapevine/2012/06/from-knowledge-to-wisdom/
Photo: Suzanne Birdsall-Stone
My reflections on these topics that Ian points to are also complemented by thoughts from a favorite catalyst of deep discourse, writer Christine DeLorey:
“… people have been talking about a great ‘awakening’ for a very long time now, but few envisaged the gut-level emotional route it would take to evolve as a species. We have often equated spirituality with the mind and consciousness – our electrical masculine energy – but maligned and ignored our magnetic feminine energy, without which we cannot be whole. The strategy of ‘divide and conquer’ starts right there!
“And as we seek balance and peace, the ‘wholeness’ dynamic is changing now, and we see how this inner battle between our masculine and feminine is reflected in all of our outer wars and atrocities.
Photo: Suzanne Birdsall-Stone
“The war on women begins with the suppression of emotion, the feminine energy within all of us. Self-expression is our greatest power, but it depends on our ability to FEEL as well as think. Everything in life moves and grows through its ability to communicate – to take reality in – and respond outwardly to it.”
Although it is in subtle ways (and what else could it be?) my forthcoming book, The Munich Girl: A novel of the legacies that outlast war, is steeped directly in these realities.
Find more from Christine Delorey here: https://creativenumerology.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/eight-eight-eight-week-32/
August 11, 2015
The pathway to the sacred gift
Photo: Suzanne Birdsall-Stone
I’m reminded daily that faithfulness to any kind of creating process involves being present to discover what is ready to be revealed, rather than trying to impose anything.
Like all creative endeavor, writing is an invitation to authenticity — a powerful and liberating experience of investigation and discovery, as life itself is meant to be.
Creative process’s greatest gift may be the way that it leads quite naturally to the harmonizing of heart and mind as collaborators in a journey of learning and expression, in service to truth. In fact, it requires this harmonizing and partnership, this dynamic balance.
And isn’t our world in great need of that dynamic balance — coherence — too?
I find that while my focus and intent must train in like a camera in order to make any progress with writing work, they must also merge in a kind of surrender that my mind can’t ever fully grasp or encompass, but my spirit can recognize, and respond to.
Indeed, my mind must become a servant to that surrender, and whatever it is that spirit can draw from and impart to it.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein said, adding, “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
Photo: Lara Kearns
I am writing out of my own search. Authenticity comes from keeping the commitment, while not knowing, something I consider sacred practice.
I keep watch, and bide, in all the faithful presence I can muster, for what that “sacred gift” will bestow.
Coming soon: The Munich Girl: A novel of the legacies that outlast war.
To receive info. about release date and related events, please email:
info@phyllisring.com
August 8, 2015
From the smallest seeds
GLEANINGS FOUND HERE AND THERE:
PHOTO: Lara Kearns
Love is a light that never dwelleth in a heart possessed by fear.
~ Bahá’u’lláh
See the LIGHT in others, and treat them as if that is ALL you SEE.
~ Wayne Dyer
PHOTO: Nelson Ashberger
You may consider yourself an individual, but as a cell biologist, I can tell you that you are in truth a cooperative community of approximately fifty trillion single-celled citizens.
~ Bruce Lipton
Look ye not upon the present, fix your gaze upon the times to come.
In the beginning, how small is the seed, yet in the end it is a mighty tree.
Look ye not upon the seed, look ye upon the tree, and its blossoms and its leaves and its fruits.
~ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
August 4, 2015
Why The Munich Girl?
Along the path of my forthcoming book, The Munich Girl, a novel about the many kinds of legacies that outlast war, there’s one question I’m asked more than any other:
What led me to write a book about Hitler’s mistress (and eventual wife), Eva Braun?
It reminds me of what so many asked after the war, after her death, when the role she had played finally came to light:
“Why her, just an ordinary Munich girl?”
Wisdom House, Litchfield, CT, Photo: Suzanne Birdsall-Stone
I had a chance to ponder both of these questions further during this summer’s conference of the International Women’s Writing Guild at a welcoming retreat center in Connecticut called Wisdom House. After nearly 40 years of memberships in various organizations, the IWWG remains my stand-out favorite.
IWWG is a wonderful network that fosters the personal and professional empowerment of women through writing. While it has nurtured an impressive record of success and achievement for its members in the publishing world, it has always aimed for both excellence and personal transformation. It especially values “an inner ability to perceive the subtle interconnections between people, events, and emotions”. If you’re a woman and a writer, check out: http://www.iwwg.org.
In a wonderful memoir workshop led by Maureen Murdock, whose book, The Heroine’s Journey (among several of hers) has shed important light on my path, I reflected on that Eva Braun question. I also recognized that my next book is likely to be a memoir about the sometimes uncanny, even mystical process that has led to my writing about her, and about Germany during the war. 
For a workshop activity that was designed to reveal more about me as a “character” of my own story, I wrote: “When I watched the films of Eva Braun, I would be moved into depths I could not understand. I was left feeling like a child who didn’t want to pull herself away from play or a remarkable new discovery.
“I wanted to visit with her over coffee, be in the presence of those expressions I saw shape her face as I watched the films in silence — feel that unmistakable lightness that she communicated in those scenes without sound. And, I wanted to better understand the struggle and despair I heard quite unmistakably in the pages of her diary. I was fascinated that she had found her way toward an audacity that could tease, even scold, someone like that tyrant she loved, even as she also seemed to give up her entire life because of him.
“Who knows which of her unnamed roles was really the more significant, in her time? The buffer she sometimes provided for others around him? The diffuser of tension she so often was, or the soother of circumstances that others undoubtedly came to rely on during the self-will-run-riot mania of a self-appointed despot?
“She seems such an emblem of what so many women do, have done, throughout the ages. Not able to enact their own potential in a direct and visible way, they must resort to doing so from the invisible sidelines and background.”
In Eva Braun’s case, that invisibility lasted the entire 16 years she spent with Hitler.
Ironically, because she was considered so insignificant, she was allowed to film the visual evidence that proved — though he publicly protested to the contrary — that the Führer did, indeed, have a private life.
One he never would have had without her.
A question that still lingers for me is, did she?
The Munich Girl: A Novel of the Legacies That Outlast War, will be published this year.
To join the book’s mailing list for news about its release and related events, email: info@phyllisring.com
August 1, 2015
In the same garden
Gleanings found here and there:
Photo: Nelson Ashberger
If we open our hearts, we will also find open hearts – it is always mutual.
~ Abbot Leo von Rudloff
… love is at the core of our being, and yet we search for it everywhere, so often causing our self pain in the process, losing our way, becoming entangled in our desires and all our images of love. Then, one day, something makes us turn away from the outer world to seek this truth within us…..
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Photo: Nelson Ashberger
At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done — then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett
That’s what causes all the pain on this earth, including the fact that the ecosystem is turned upside down. All of that comes from people not making friends with themselves and never being willing to communicate with the one they consider to be the troublemaker. That’s how we stay caught in this battleground, this war zone.
~ Pema Chödrön
We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.
~ Ram Dass
July 30, 2015
Singing the high parts, together
In this steamy East-Coast week, my heart is delighted to share A Winter’s Day, a Guest Post from writer, muser, and soul-life sounder, Larry Moffitt.
Larry and Taeko Moffitt
A WINTER’S DAY
by Larry Moffitt
It’s late July, early, early in the morning. Slightly post pre-dawn. The sky only appears to be transitioning from dark purple to the lighter blue range. At this point, whether the horizon will ever actually brighten, whether the sun will rise, is anybody’s guess. I stand in front of the window sipping coffee. If I hold the cup right under my eye and peer over the rim toward where the sky meets the horizon, I catch the purple in the steam.
Honey Nim comes out, “What are you doing?”
One eye closed, keeping the cup absolutely still, I focus like a Shaolin monk. “I’m steaming the purple.”
“Go put on some clothes.”
“I made you some coffee. Sugar?”
“Not today, and just a little arf-n-arf. Thanks. So what are you doing?”
“Look… steam. And dark purple sky… over there near the ground.”
Image: D. Kirkup Designs
She sips her coffee, looking thoughtfully where I’m pointing. “Yeah.”
I switch gears, sing softly, “A winter’s day, in a deep and dark December. I am alone, gazing from my window to the streets below, on a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow. I am a rock; I am an island.”
“What’s that?”
“Song… Paul and Artie… You know, ‘…and here’s to you Mrs. Robinson, heaven holds a place…’ those guys.”
“Oh yeah… tall, curly hair, sings the high part.”
“The song is about isolation and emotional detachment.”
She knows I’m headed somewhere with this, or not, and she has this nice habit of not rushing it. It’s a survival trick for when you find yourself in an international or interracial marriage. Our conversations can drift rudderless for minutes on end without anyone requiring a “point.” Until one of us gets it, we usually wait it out in the middle distance. She moves past me, closer to the window and gazes, squinting, willing the deep purple to dissolve into sunrise. 
I stand behind her, talking into the back of her neck. “Which do you think is better, to give yourself freely to loving another even though you could end up broken-hearted, or to carefully protect your heart, but in doing so, never feel the roller-coaster thrill of love?”
She turned, puzzled. “What?”
It’s not a terribly complicated idea, and I knew the gap was mostly technical, so I explained it again, in more or less similar words.
“It makes him crazy,” she said.
“Love makes you crazy?”
“Yes,” she said, “know what I mean, jellybean?”
“I know what you mean, crocodile.”
I put my arms around her, drawing her in. Our cups of coffee mutually encircled one another. I sang another snippet. “I have my books and my poetry to protect me…”
“Go put on some clothes.”
About Larry:
The final, and most difficult, seeking of my life is to find, and become, my true self. To genuinely become SanViejo (Saint Old Guy), not just have it as my email address. I was born in Liberal, Kansas — the most misnamed place since Greenland — in a breech birth. I have been on a cattle drive in Paraguay, I have been to a cockfight and I got kissed on the mouth by the Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Kazakhstan. I am good at growing tomatoes. I am driven by three unmanageable forces: a meaning of life gene, an art & poetry gene, and a humor gene. Not necessarily in that order. I want to live by the side of the road and be a friend to man.
July 26, 2015
The freedom in not fighting
Photo: Lara Kearns
With the return of each day’s light comes an invitation to investigate, throughout the span of that day, rather than imitate the past. Do I accept it, and apply myself to what it invites?
It arrives in a world of imperfection, one that can easily draw negative reactions from my lower nature, which must find its way in that world. Yet I’ve surely had opportunity to learn that dwelling on imperfections, berating myself or others for them, serves only to increase my perception of them. It’s a circle of suffering I draw for myself. It saps my time, energy, and attention (those aspects of life over which I have choice) when I could instead offer them for something that is always calling, if softly, at times: the building of the good that I’m invited into each day.
Photo: Lara Kearns
In responding to that call, I discover how very much there is to become aware of and relinquish—how much preoccupation with negativity surrounds my life and can fill my thoughts and absorb my personal resources. This, in many lives, is the debilitating presence of blind imitation of the past, including the kind of thinking that was born in earlier, fearful experiences and has led to attitudes, behaviors, assumptions, and beliefs that have no basis in reality—nor, indeed, anywhere near it.
Photo: Lara Kearns
My encounter with imperfection extends an invitation, too—one urging me to recognize and accept how much I don’t know, or can’t change, yet I can always discover the limitless possibilities of love in the most essential kind of response I’ve been designed and equipped to make. Rather than exercising my survival-driven instinctual reaction to fight imperfection, or try to escape it, I can turn toward an innate, indwelling response—the possibility of it—that is better-aligned with the purpose for which I’ve been created.
As it invites me into the freedom of not fighting any one or any thing (including myself), it also reminds that every human interaction (including with myself) is either an act of giving or an act of receiving. By asking questions that encompass both giving and receiving, my sensitivity to my own true needs and those of others is increased daily. Each part of this questioning is equally important, because giving depends on someone willing and capable of receiving from me, and receiving depends on someone willing and capable of giving to me.
The following two service questions have been conceived as a way to help us focus on and clarify reality for ourselves in the course of the countless decisions we are called upon to make each day. Those junctures of possibility arrive moment by moment, and as I seek to draw away from blind imitation of the past toward the true investigation of my own and others’ deepest reality, I return to these questions again and again:
At this moment in time, what is the act of service I am capable of giving that the other person is capable of receiving?
At this moment in time, what is the act of service I am capable of receiving that the other person is capable of giving?
Adapted from With Thine Own Eyes: Why Imitate the Past When We Can Investigate Reality?
More information: http://www.amazon.com/With-Thine-Own-Eyes-Investigate-ebook/dp/B00I1JPC7I/ref=pd_sim_kstore_11?ie=UTF8&refRID=0TQC490J7FVBRTJWM70H
Print version at: http://www.bahairesources.com/with-thine-own-eyes.html
July 23, 2015
Larger than we have imagined
It’s a big gift when readers respond to a story, its characters, and its world as if they have visited and are sad to leave. Even better is when a book lingers on in their own world afterward.
Photo: D. Kirkup Jewelry Designs
Someone told me recently that after reading Snow Fence Road, she had a dream set in its world, among its characters.
She may never know how deep an affirmation this is for me. The book came into being through my vivid dream about the trauma that shatters its hero’s life. Then, like an accompanying mark of closure the week after I finished writing it, I dreamed of the characters in the next stage of their life, after “The End”.
That experience the reader shared is also a reinforcement because in my newest work, The Munich Girl, a character’s dream life is as important a resource for her as every other kind of knowledge. Just as dreams have always been for me. I experienced some inner debate about this when I received feedback that questioned whether it’s of any value to include dreams and their contributions in the novel’s story. I had to remind myself that, for some, dreams have little or no validity in life.
Image: Cary Enoch / EnochsVision.com
“Dreams are the threads that weave our unconscious wisdom, wishes, knowing and foreknowing into the tapestry of our waking lives,” says Paula Chaffee Scardamalia of The Divining Muse.“They often call us to live larger, to be more than we have imagined for ourselves.”
If anything sums up the call pulling at my novel’s protagonist, it is that last sentence of Paula’s.
“Life consists of two journeys: the outward journey of the body through time and space, and an inner journey of the soul,” writes Dave Tomlinson. And stories are one of the most enduring ways that humans reflect and learn on each of those journeys.
“We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. “Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
Isn’t it interesting that what we call those nocturnal stories is the same name we give to our most cherished hopes and visions: dreams.
