Most of us go about our day as if we were on a track: we know what we need to accomplish and set out for it, whether it’s to finish a report, follow a diet, catch a train, or meditate. If we’re not focused on something specific, on the other hand, our awareness tends to shrink. In either state, we ignore ideas and sights that beckon alluringly from other directions, urging us to pause and explore them. We tell ourselves that we’re too busy, or that these invitations are mere distractions. And yet, as the French poet and chronicler of the profound meanings of ‘Things,’ Francis Ponge, wrote, we cannot truly see something until we approach it not as a superior, but as an equal that has the power to startle us with the marvel of its selfhood. ‘It is necessary for things to disarrange you,’ wrote Ponge. When we enter the interactive Maginal Zone, we deliberately let the world disarrange us, surprise, and enlighten us. The attempt to define the intriguing, yet elusive territory between the physical and metaphysical worlds is ancient and universal. Carl Jung was fascinated with synchronicity, an ‘acausal connecting principle,’ or timely occurrence, inner and outer, coming together in a non-linear, yet meaningful way. Did the inner world invite the outer? Jung himself did not have the answer, but he perceived synchronicity as neither entirely psychological nor entirely physical, yet occupying a real ‘psychoid’ space between. Nancy Qualls-Corbet, a Jungian analyst, says defining the boundaries of this mysterious territory is less important than asking the question, ‘What is it that the world is bringing us when we are in harmony, when we feel very connected to our sense of inner life?’…….Trebbe Johnson

finding our sanity in the precious heart that seeks its own wisdom….who is it that we hear when we are stuck? when we are in the distant past? when we are in the presence of Source? when we don’t know anything? when we find the ancient quiet we keep losing?

Reality, as it is, is called suchness. Suchness means, ‘it is like that.’ You cannot describe it in terms of notions, especially notions of birth and death, being and non-being, coming and going. No word, no idea, no notion can describe reality: the reality of a table, the reality of a flower, the reality of a house, the reality of a living being. To meditate means to be invited on a journey of looking deeply in order to touch our true nature and to recognize that nothing is lost. Because of this we can overcome fear. The ultimate is the foundation of our being, the ground of being…….Thich Nhat Hanh

the wondrous call

The spirit

likes to dress up like this:

ten fingers,

ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest

at night

in the black branches,

in the morning

in the blue branches

of the world.

It could float, of course,

but would rather

plumb rough matter.

Airy and shapeless thing,

it needs

the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,

the oceanic fluids;

it needs the body’s world,

instinct

and imagination

and the dark hug of time,

sweetness,

and tangibility,

to be understood,

to be more than pure light

that burns

where no one is-

so it enters us-

in the morning

shines from brute comfort

like a stitch of lightning;

and at night

lights up the deep and wondrous

drownings of the body

like a star.

…..Mary Oliver