Day 16 Practice: Gratitude for you
“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”
I want to thank you and express my gratitude for your participation and presence over the last 15 days. Hopefully together we have created some space…. and momentum of presence and heart to see our lives more clearly, to recognize the goodness within and all around us, while deepening trust in our capacity to navigate the natural unfolding of life. May our time together point us towards well-being, ease, and love.
I wanted to leave you with some poems that have resonated with me as of late…
Clearing by Martha Postlethwaite
Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life
and wait there patiently,
until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worth of rescue.
Remember by Joy Harjo
Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people are you.
Remember you are this universe and this universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.
Adrift by Mark Nepo
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
Intention by Johann Hira
I intend to breathe my way through conflict,
To breathe my way through the great risks;
To breathe my way through the ebb and flow of grief,
To breathe my way through the muck and mire of life,
To breathe my way through dark disappointments.
I intent to be with my true self,
To listen for what is beneath the stillness,
To see the lingering pain of others,
To bow before the great teachers- children and nature,
To love all things more fully.
I intend to open my arms and my heart to the world,
remembering that we belong to each other.
Be well until the next time 🙏
With Metta, Banni