You have to strive every minute to get rid of the life

that you have planned in order to have

the life that’s waiting to be yours.

Move. Move. Move into the transcendent.

That’s what the whole sense of adventure is.

…Joseph Campbell

and we shall be urged into gratitude once again….looking down into that hole of life and death never finds us ready……the ethos of this fragmented and seemingly random culture hovers around our willing hearts, warning and subduing and draining……maybe this is why we are called to love…..to seek the very paradox and healing that moves with us on this amazing journey…..

Those who seem most alive are those who want the truth more than life itself. If you want life more than truth, you will seldom touch the truth of your life. Our original nature is like clear water. Born again into a world of wildly changing forms, though having no essential form of our own, we take on the shapes of the containers we are poured into. We become sons or daughters and are told to think of ourselves in that manner. Acculturated, we bend to the curves of that arbitrary modality. Slowly we freeze into that shape. The straighter and harder the edge the more we are praised as being someone of merit. Our mind like a wild river, our heart like a desert. But water is water. Melting, it remembers; evaporating, it ascends. When you let go of control of the universe, when you let go of everything, only the truth remains. Your actions come out of the present. There is no force. Fully present. Able to respond, not out of personal desire, but out of a sense of the appropriateness of things. You respond from the flow itself, or perhaps better stated, the flow responds to itself. Letting go of the little mind, of your suffering, is simpler than you think, though it’s the hardest work you will ever do…….Stephen Levine

dog days of the spiritual path…..

Glorious is it to see

the caribou flocking down from the forests

and beginning

their wandering to the North.

Timidly they watch

for the pitfalls of man.

Glorious is it to see

the great herds from the forests

spreading out over the plains of white.

Glorious to see.

I think over again

my small adventures,

my fears.

Those small ones that seemed so big-

for all of the vital things I had to get and to reach

and yet there is only one great thing,

to live and see the great day that dawns

and the light that fills the world.

……Inuit Poem