WHISPERING TREES AND ECHOING HILLS

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WHISPERING TREES AND ECHOING HILLS

I hear it was you who gave me my heart...

Thank you for opening my eyes .….

to the astonishing miracles of life
to the beauty surrounding you
to the uniqueness of your being
to the wonders of your love





I will not leave when you become a star
But stay with you as near and as far
As I dream in your darkest hour
When you carry me across the water, without sound
Where awakened birds
Sleep awhile
Before they fly, to testify
Your inner magenta light.
And by your sweet sounds
Become silent
When questions disappear.

My Earthly Mother who waits

EMBRACED.

HUMANITY BEHIND A SUNBEAM

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This sense of affection, this love, this quality cannot be cultivated, cannot be practised, cannot be brought about ... but it must happen as naturally as breathing, as fully with great joy and delight as the movement of the sun rising and falling. 

“Go with your heart”. 

Let love be your reason for doing things. When love is your guiding light, then you know you are on the right path.

 

TIME TO STEP INTO THE SUNLIGHT

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The presence of balance can also be seen as a deep and devoted trust in the vibration of life.

Do not take anything personally in these days, no matter the seeming 

appearance of it. It is simply the release within each person’s Being 

of all that was harbored, not consciously faced and never addressed.

Honour your need for quiet moments of reflection and going within.

Let the Light shine through your heart, through your eyes and through your smile.

It is time to step into the sunlight of your tomorrows.

JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL

MY FAVOURITE THOUGHT

…that goodwill is the magic of universal cooperation and sharing.

To listen, one has to have not only a certain quality of attention but also a sense of affection, a sense of trying to understand what life is saying. Then both are in communication with each other.

One has to learn the art of listening. When you listen to music which you like, there is no resistance. You go with it, you shake your head, you clap your hands, you do all kinds of things to express your appreciation, your understanding of the quality of the music, and so on. There is no form of defence, no form of resistance, you are going with it, you are flowing with it.

So, learning the art of listening, to the birds, to the wind, to the breeze, is to become extraordinarily sensitive in listening. When you listen, you catch up quickly, you don't have to have a lot of explanations, analyses and descriptions, you are flowing with each other.





Talking together as two friends sitting in a park, or in a wood, quiet, birds are singing, there's plenty of light coming through the leaves on the floor and there is a sense of appreciation of beauty. When you so listen, the miracle takes place. When you so listen, it is like sowing a seed.

So one has to learn the art of listening.

If you listen very, very carefully, you capture it so quickly, the meaning of what the other is saying. There is great beauty in listening to a bird, to the wind among the leaves, and to a word that is spoken with depth, with meaning, with passion.

Is it that we are so caught up in our own network of problems, our own desires, our own urges of pleasure and pain that we never look around, never watch the moon? Watch it. Watch with all your eyes and ears, your sense of smell. 




Watch. 


Look as though you are looking for the first time. If you can do that, that tree, that bush, that blade of grass you are seeing for the first time.

To be in communion with nature, not verbally caught in the description of it, but be a part of it, be aware, feel that you belong to all that, be able to have love for all that, to admire a deer, the lizard on the wall, that broken branch lying on the ground. 





Looking at the evening star or the new moon, without the word, without merely saying how beautiful it is and turning your back on it, attracted by something else, but watch that single star and new delicate moon as though for the first time. 


We have lost all sense of relationship in which there is not only a verbal statement of affection and concern but also this sense of communion which is not verbal. 


It is a sense that we are all together, that we are all human beings, not divided, not broken up, not belonging to any particular group or race, or to some idealistic concepts, but that we are all human beings, we are all living on this extraordinary, beautiful earth.

Have you ever woken up in the morning and looked out of the window, or gone out on the terrace and looked at the trees and the spring dawn? 


Live with it. 


Listen to all the sounds, to the whisper, the slight breeze among the leaves. See the light on that leaf and watch the sun coming over the hill, over the meadow 


....that animal grazing and those sheep across the hill watch them. Look at them with a sense of affection, care, that you do not want to hurt a thing. 


When you have such communion with nature, then your relationship with another becomes simple, clear


………….without conflict and pain.

REVOLTING SOCIETY

Who but yourself can tell whether you are beautiful or ugly within ?

To revolt within society in order to make it a little better, to bring about certain reforms, is like the revolt of prisoners to improve their life within the prison walls; and such revolt is no revolt at all, it is just mutiny.

Do you see the difference? 

Revolt within society is like the mutiny of prisoners who want better food, better treatment within the prison; but revolt born of understanding is an individual breaking away from society, and that is creative revolution. 

Now, if you as an individual break away from society, is that action motivated by ambition? If it is, then you have not broken away at all, you are still within the prison, because the very basis of society is ambition, acquisitiveness, greed.

But if you understand all that and bring about a revolution in your own heart and mind, then you are no longer ambitious, you are no longer motivated by envy, greed, acquisitiveness, and therefore you will be entirely outside of a society which is based on those things.




Then you are a creative individual and in your action there will be the seed of a different culture.

So there is a vast difference between the action of creative revolution, and the action of revolt or mutiny within society. As long as you are concerned with mere reform, with decorating the bars and walls of the prison, you are not creative.

Reformation always needs further reform, it only brings more misery, more destruction.




Whereas, the mind that understands this whole structure of acquisitiveness, of greed, of ambition and breaks away from it


--such a mind is in constant revolution.

It is an expansive, a creative mind therefore 


...like a stone thrown into a pool of still water 


...its action produces waves, and those waves will form a


different civilization altogether.

BEING ALONE ...A BENEDICTION

BEYOND THE LONELINESS AND ISOLATION

It is difficult to put that feeling into words, but I will try.

It is a fear that comes when one feels to be completely alone, entirely by oneself, utterly cut off from everything.

It was fearful and breathtaking...................

I didn't belong to anyone; there was a sense of complete isolation.

Most people have this feeling of loneliness, this sense of isolation, with its fear, only they smother it, run a way from it, get themselves lost in some form of activity, religious or otherwise. The activity in which they indulge is their escape, they can get lost in it, and that's why they defend it so aggressively.

Often, being very clever and capable, such people mislead others by their devotion to the activity which is their escape; if it isn't religion, it's politics, or social reform - anything to get away from themselves.

They may seem to be selfless, but they are actually concerned with themselves, only in a different way. They become leaders, or the followers of some teacher; they always belong to something, or practice some method, or pursue an ideal.

They are never just themselves; they are not human beings, but labels.

So you see how fortunate you are to not have found an escape ?

Loneliness is something you don't understand, and in that sense it's like a disease that will keep on recurring; so it's meaningless to run away from it.

You have tried running away, but it keeps overtaking you ...........doesn't it ?

Is this not what you are already doing ?

In this relationship ( with another ) called society, every human being is cutting him/herself off from another by their position, by ambition, by desires for fame, power, to be popular and so on; but he/she has to live in this brutal relationship with others like themselves, so the whole thing is glossed over and made respectable by pleasant sounding words....there is no relationship.

In everyday life, each one is devoted to his/her own interests, though it may be in the name of country, in the name of peace, or God, and so this isolating process goes on.

One becomes aware of this whole process in the form of intense loneliness, a feeling of complete isolation. Thought, which has been giving all importance to itself, isolating itself as the `me', has finally come to the point of realizing that it has been held in the prison of it's own making.

It is like seeing a cobra. Having once seen it you can never mistake it; you don't have to depend on anybody to tell you what a cobra is. Similarly, when once you have understood this feeling, that understanding is always with you; when once you have learned to look, you have the capacity to see.

But one must go through and beyond this feeling, for there is much more to be discovered.

TO BE ALONE

There is an ''aloneness'' which is not this loneliness, this sense of isolation. That state of ''aloneness'' is not a remembrance or a recognition...

it is untouched by the mind, by the word, by the society, by tradition.

It is a ...BENEDICTION.

TREES BY THE LAKE ...COMPASSION

AN OCEAN REFUSES NO RIVER .......

TREES by the lake.....

As the sun rises slowly over the horizon, over the trees, these trees become all of a sudden golden. All the leaves are bright with life and as you watch them as the hours pass by, - an extraordinary quality seems to spread all over the land, over the lake.

And as the sun rises a little higher the leaves begin to flutter, to dance. And each hour seems to give to the trees a different quality. Before the sun rises they have a sombre feeling, quiet, far away, full of dignity. And as the day begins, the leaves with the light on them dance and give them that peculiar feeling that one has of great beauty.

By midday their shadow has deepened and you can sit there protected from the sun, never feeling lonely, with the trees as your companion. As you sit there, there is a relationship of deep abiding security and a freedom that only trees can know.

Towards the evening when the skies are lit up by the setting sun, the trees gradually become sombre, dark, closing in on themselves. The sky has become red, yellow, green, but the trees remains quiet, hidden, and are resting for the night.

We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree.

Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots. You must be extraordinarily sensitive to hear the sound.

This sound is not the noise of the world, not the noise of the chattering of the mind, not the vulgarity of human quarrels and human warfare but sound as part of the universe.

Just watch. Watch those clouds shaping and reshaping, watch the trees, the little birds. It is all part of life. When you watch attentively, with diligence, there is nothing to learn; there is only that vast space, in the silence.

But watching, in which there is attention, awareness, and a great sense of passion, awareness has its own intelligence.

This watching and intelligence acts. But this requires great alertness, to see things without the word, without the name, without any reaction ...

in that watching there is a great vitality.........COMPASSION.

AN ACORN HOLDS THE PROMISE OF A THOUSAND FORESTS

Who can explain the lure of freedom in nature’s heart ?


An acorn holds the promise of a thousand forests

Simple ............like an uncarved block of stone





From the past we turn our eyes to the future where death, the unknown, the darkness, the mystery, awaits us.

Fascinated by these we can no longer detach ourselves from them. The mystery of the future holds for us the fulfilment of all our desires, which the past has denied to us, and in our dreams we fly to that brilliant horizon where happiness must exist, where we must seek it.



No one will ever pierce the infinite mystery of the future - impenetrable in its evanescent illusion - neither magician nor prophet.

But on the contrary it will be the mystery which will engulf us, which will not let us escape, which will break the mainspring of our life.

Life is not to be approached through the past, nor through the mirage of the future. Life cannot be approached through intermediaries, nor conquered for another.



That discovery can only be made in the immediate present - by the individual for himself and not for others -


Man, not yet having achieved that condition of life in the present, lives in the past which he regrets, lives in the future where he hopes, but never in the present which he ignores.