Phyllis Edgerly Ring's Blog, page 50

Two wings of one soul

   Albert Einstein said:

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is faithful servant.

  We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

In her book about creativity and spirituality, The Soul Tells a Story, author Vinita Hampton Wright refers to these as “the intuitive mind” and “the analytical mind”.  She describes that the intuitive mind draws from the deep (unlimited) inner well of our soul, and the realms from which it emanates, while the analytical mind receives what it brings forth and then integrates, relates, and organizes it.

Each of these two partners is potentially strengthened by the other. She calls their mutual partnership and cooperation “the balance that leads to greatness,” and what allows us to be true and “full participants in a divine process”.

It would seem that being such a participant calls for learning about what the analytical and intuitive aspects are like, and how they work together. When they do work as partners, they can yield a heady blend of skill and structure, as well as unlimited possibilities for our creative vision.

This partnership has the power to liberate resources that separation and disunity have chained up. It can even effect a dynamic coherence between the material and spiritual requirements of our lives.

Dynamic: Constantly active, changing; vital – alive

Coherence: Holding together; wholeness in unity – balance

What allows our being and our doing to remain dynamic?

How do we feel and recognize the balance of coherence?

What helps our intuitive and rational capacities work together to make these possible?

At the center of the circle

A young friend described the rapid, often overnight changes appearing in the garden he and his wife have tended so carefully. Just days ago, there was limitless, burgeoning life in summer’s relentless sun and heat and rainfall.

Then, like a puff of breath on a dandelion gone to seed, it is spent and gone; fading away, or into decay.

In New England especially, these changes arrive as abruptly as the night chill that turns the leaves from green to scarlet.

“Stay at the center of the circle, and let all things take their course,” urges the Tao Te Ching.

Out at the sharp edges of the periphery, our very human selves can feel small and overcome, overwhelmed, in the inevitable enormity of change. The mind, confounded, struggles for purchase it can’t find.

It’s then that a way is opened through which feelings, those unexpected guests left waiting so long in a side room, can emerge. Autumn, in particular, with its cycles of death and harvest, seems well-suited for inviting forth the grief and pain that so much effort has tried so long to avoid, or contain.Those seeds of unclaimed treasure found only in a heart broken open.

The center of the circle, that trustworthy core, can hold these, and us, as it holds all, and remind of what Rumi saw with such kind wisdom:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and scared. Don’t open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do. 

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.

What is the beauty we love?

What are those hundreds of ways?

Try to leave the light on

O Son of Being! With the hands of power I made thee and with the fingers of might I created thee; and within thee have I placed the essence of My light.

O Son of Being! Thou art My lamp and My light is in thee. Get thou from it thy radiance and seek none other than Me. For I have created thee rich and have bountifully shed my favor upon thee.     Baha’u'llah

Every once in a while, a piece of truth that’s been looking me in the face for years, making no attempt to hide itself, stops me in my tracks. Often it’s something in recent life experience that sounds an inner chord and makes words I think I’ve heard and understood come through with new implications as loud as a siren.

An experience I had in the dark gave me a whole new appreciation for light, and lamps. I suppose that’s as good a place as any to have an epiphany about these.

When my husband and I rented a small vacation apartment in Germany, the landlord showed us around the place before he headed away on business. His English was limited, as is our German. What I later realized that he had cautioned us about was, roughly translated, “Remember the light.”

When we returned home later that night, it quickly became obvious why he’d said this. We had neglected to put on the exterior light. And on this overcast night, the narrow old-town streets, most of which are also hills, were incredibly dark. The uneven, irregularly spaced steps down into the tiny alley on which our apartment’s front door was located were treacherous. We groped our way down slowly, VERY carefully, in the thick black. The cobblestones underfoot were still slippery from rain. We were relieved to finally step inside without any sprains or falls.

Waiting the very next morning as I spent some quiet time at the start of the day were those two passages above. This is definitely a way the angels have their fun with me, sometimes.

And there was this passage from ‘Abdu’l-Baha to go with them:

The good pleasure of God is love for His creatures. The will and plan of God is that each individual member of humankind shall become illumined like unto a lamp, radiant with all the destined virtues of humanity, leading his fellow creatures out of natural darkness into the heavenly light. Therein rests the virtue and glory of the world of humanity.

One light, and so very many lamps — each and every member of humankind.

Just what kind of brilliant light might all of those “destined virtues of humanity” provide that makes it bright enough to lead us from the “natural darkness” of a sore-tried world into the safe, joyful freedom of “heavenly light”?

Adapted from Life at First Sight: Finding the Divine in the Details:

http://www.amazon.com/Life-First-Sight-Finding-Details/dp/1931847673/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

 

Awareness unwraps the gift

Imagine we are desert-bound souls desperately seeking water. If we are offered anything but water we will turn away. We might be offered a change of clothes, food, shelter — all good things. But the desperate nature of life-threatening thirst will cause the thirsty one to reject what is offered as if the offering were poison.

When we experience intense suffering personally, our world seems to narrow dramatically and become very small. Imagine the intense pain we feel when we sustain a deep burn or when we sustain a loss. Do we really care at that moment about any other needs in our life, no matter how legitimate they are? The need that seems most desperate can crowd out of our consciousness all other needs until that need is met, whether it is removing our hand from a heat source, healing from grief or quenching our thirst with life-giving water.

If it is our desperate need to discover our authentic self and purpose, then once we know that true identity and purpose and understand the most beneficial ways to act, we’ll be ready for other things.

Without the awareness and involvement of our spiritual nature — who we truly are — our life is rather like a gift we can never unwrap nor fully receive.

Excerpted from With Thine Own Eyes: Why Imitate the Past When We Can Investigate Reality?, coming soon from George Ronald Publisher.

The flow was pushed

Big thanks to Penney Peirce and her Intuition & Energy blog for a gem she treasured in one of her posts recently. (There are many gems at Penney’s blog.)

She’s making her way across country in a flow of transition and shared this from writer Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. …I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free.

Then, Penney notes, Dillard “has a turn of thought and says”:

The damned thing was flowing because it was pushed.

This leaves me gasping. How am I learning how to love, receive, and value this push?

Find Penney Peirce’s blog and more about her work and publications at: http://intuitnow.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-flow-driving-in-it.html

 

Creativity’s gifts and homecomings

Along this writer’s path this week:

Big thanks to Paula Chaffee Scardamalia for her kind words about Snow Fence Road in her Divine Mus-ings newsletter this week:

 … One of the magical elements of Ring’s book is that coastal Maine is as much of a character as Tess and Evan. From berry picking to wind-swept snow drifts that only a snow fence prevents from piling up on the road, the setting provides both backdrop and impact, leaving indelible images on characters and readers in the process. … Ring’s love story resonates with the poetry of her language and her images, and her belief in the nobility of the human heart. Check it out.

And do check out the wonderful resources at Paula’s site below. It has an especially inspiring gift for creating souls this week – an invitation to the joy of a “creative homecoming”. Naturally, that includes the heart “and all that resides therein, emotions, dreams, intuitions, creativity”. It also incorporates thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs, illumination, and of course, Divine inspiration, as well as the sacred possibility of healing and finding balance within ourselves.

Paula gave me a huge gift years ago when she helped me understand the precious relationship my dreams have with my creativity.

Discover more at Paula’s site here: http://www.diviningthemuse.com/experience-a-creative-homecoming-monday-tarot-message-from-the-muse-for-the-week-of-8262013/

 

Waiting till the mud settles

Gleanings here and there:

(Please note – formerly mis-attributed phrase now corrected to it true source: Dr. Bob Moorehead.)

When the urgent crowds out the important, people urgently accomplish nothing of value.

~ Orrin Woodward

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.

~ Dr. Bob Moorehead

Do you have the patience to wait

till your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving

till the right action arises by itself

~Tao Te Ching

The spirit of oneness is holy indeed

“An intermediary is needed to bring two extremes into relation with each other. Riches and poverty, plenty and need: Without some kind of intermediary power, there could be no relation between such pairs of opposites.”

When he shared these words with his listeners in Paris in 1911, ‘Abdu’l-Baha noted that as citizens of one world, our shared home, we are “in extreme need” of such an intermediary, a power by which we are able to receive help from the Divine Reality, the Source of all life. He likened that Reality to the sun, and the Holy Spirit to the rays of the sun. The sun doesn’t descend to the earth, nor the earth ascend to the sun. It is the rays of the sun that bring illumination and life to earth.

In the following year, addressing an American audience, he shared more about the vital, life-giving role of the Holy Spirit when he described the means by which true unity will be established within the human race:

“The source of perfect unity and love in the world of existence is the bond and oneness of reality. When the divine and fundamental reality enters human hearts and lives, it conserves and protects all states and conditions of mankind, establishing that intrinsic oneness of the world of humanity which can only come into being through the efficacy of the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit is like unto the life in the human body, which blends all differences of parts and members in unity and agreement.”

He then urged his listeners to reflect on how diverse the various parts of the human body are. He described how, in a whole and healthy body, there is a oneness of animating spirit that “establishes such a unity in the bodily organism that if any part is subjected to injury or becomes diseased, all the other parts and functions sympathetically respond and suffer, owing to the perfect oneness that exists.”

Just as the human spirit is the animating element that unites and coordinates the parts of a human body, the Holy Spirit is the controlling cause of the unity and coordination of the body of humankind, he said. “The bond or oneness of humanity cannot be effectively established save through the power of the Holy Spirit, for the world of humanity is a composite body, and the Holy Spirit is the animating principle of its life.”

The evidence of ever-increasing dis-ease in that body of humankind is all around us. In the course of our lives each day, what might each of us do to harness the power of the Holy Spirit to establish unity, and healing, within it?

What makes cells of the body healthy, and what do healthy cells do? What can we each contribute to the unity of healing, and the building of the good? And what strengthens and empowers us to do that?

Our choice holds the remedy

When I don’t invest in a lower emotional tone, don’t buttress and reinforce it, shrug it on like a cloak or a duty or a sentence, an inner vision, and a spirit of faith, are waiting to take me in a different direction.

These dwell faithfully with me and will, like blooming plants, reach, always, and with complete willingness, toward the uplifting joy of acceptance and happiness right in the moment.

Why would I imagine I want anything else, or that there’s any other choice to be made? Where else can I be right now, anyway?

Yet it’s my choice that allows this. When I do, I feel energy arriving. This choice bestows energy rather than consuming it. Always an affirming embrace, it feels like a favorite memory.

This possibility is available in each moment, so long as some story, some made-up figment that’s never been real, isn’t allowed to convince me otherwise. The feelings that such figments may hold, or try to hide from, could be worth my consideration, though.

I have to remind myself each day that the human world offers very little reinforcement for choosing the remedy of this truthful way.

But I am capable of remembering, and turning to receive, what does.

The All-Knowing Physician … perceiveth the disease, and prescribeth, in His unerring wisdom, the remedy.                                                   ~Bahá’u’llah

Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don’t.    ~ Steve Maraboli

Photos courtesy of D. Kirkup Designs / https://www.facebook.com/KirkupDesigns

Blueberry muffins, anyone?

For those of you reading Snow Fence Road who tell me it’s made you hungry for blueberry muffins, here’s a terrific-sounding recipe.

It’s one I bet could easily be adapted to use a flour other than wheat, if that’s your preference.

My thanks to Maine author Susan Poulin for sharing this information from the Catching Health blog of Maine food and health writer Diane Atwood.

In the spirit of “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”, find this yummy way to enjoy these antioxidant-rich little treasures from nature at:

http://catchinghealth.bangordailynews.com/2013/08/16/nom-nom/blueberry-recipes-from-blueberry-muffins-to-blueberry-bliss/

And if you haven’t already spent some time in Maine with Snow Fence Road, discovering just how many unexpected developments one bucket of berries can lead to, you can learn more about the book here:

http://phyllisedgerlyring.wordpress.com/make-a-beginning-and-all-will-come-right/