Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
There is nothing in this moment
that stays.
Nothing to guide me,
Nothing to hinder me.
Those are all thoughts and feelings
that rise and fall.
They come from nowhere
except from
previous thoughts and feelings.
Yes, there is sensation and emotion,
the brain’s tools for
sifting through
I’ve not tried before to retrace in memory how my poems come into being. Yesterday a close friend’s response to “Fixed” move me to do so.
This poem came to me, as most of them do, in much the same way that spoken ministry messages come to me during Quaker waiting worship. I am inspired by something, perhaps something very minor, that crosses my awareness, and suddenly there is an image or word or phrase.
My usual morning practice
…About a month ago I made a mistake. It happened sometime between my early morning preparation for waiting worship and the rise of Meeting.
The concept of the transpersonal is one which I have thought I understood intellectually for decades, going back to my naïve fascination with mystical paths in the 1970s, and maturing through years of contemplation and study.
That First Day, though, the concept became viscerally alive as I read a selection in The Essential Ken
…On the floating dock below Bartram Campus of Bolles School, before Friends Meeting a few weekends ago, I looked north into the shadows and saw the scene I have called Glyphs of wood and water. The water so still, the curves of wood almost speaking aloud.
I turned to the south then, where the mid-morning sun reached the creek from above the trees.
Each year on my birthday, I look forward to reading the meditation for August 29th in Daily Word, the devotional magazine of Unity Church.
The message has always tended to be something I could welcome as a motto for the new year, something which affirmed my sense of self and reassured me that I was on the so-called “spiritual path.”
This year, however, I stumbled mentally. The day’s topic was “Pray for Others,” and the opening affirmation was:
…One of my Friendly correspondents has reminded me that, back in February, I addressed some of the concerns of the previous post from the perspective of my alter-ego Walhydra’s hopeful skepticism.
In “The Virgin of Hollywood, Florida,” Walhydra groused at length about the gullibility of “the masses,” who blithely toss their belief after every tabloid headline, urban legend, or political sound bite.
Yet she found herself wondering: “How does one move from scorn for the credulous to a working, sustaining
…
