Little Blog Thoughts

I have been thinking about the "double realm" since I heard Tami Simon (Sounds True) interview Brother David Steindl-Rast a few weeks ago on this topic. Brother David is founder of the Gratefulness.org website and just had his 90th birthday.

He thanks Echart Tolle for this phrase "the double realm" in the sense that it was the latter's teaching on "the Power of Now" that introduced Brother David to the possibility of experiencing the double realm: i.e., when we practice being in the power of "now" it removes us for those few seconds or that time from the daily time-bound and focused pre-occupation and opens within us a sense of the eternal. At moments, we are aware of both at once, and this is "living in the double realm."

I know this place. I experience it frequently, the moreso as I advance in age, and sometimes unexpectedly. It is spacious and expanding, and relieves immediate concerns.

I recommend it as a healing and grounding practice for our pressured and crowded days. For the interview itself, search for "Tami Simon's interview of Brother David Steindl Rast on his 90th birthday."

Know that time when life takes over? That's what's been happening to me these two months and now I am glad to be back. No particular explanation (except the preparation, search and finding of a publisher for my fourth collection of poems which is announced on another page in this site)...and I have been noting particular spiritual emergences that are new and gripping. Especially those arising from Ink and Honey and The Way of Belle Coeur: A Woman's Vade Mecum, which I spoke about in the book section of this web page.

The latter especially pulls me in with its many and powerful suggestions for artistic and spiritual practices. Its richness is even a bit overwhelming at times. As I read the suggestions, I feel the intense creative powers that are marshalling....and I have begun a large art book of gatherings of spiritual connection and experiences. At some point, perhaps in the fall, I will invite a gathering of women for this purpose, perhaps online as well as locally.

Our time in history is escalating with demands, possibilities, and the spiralling need for connection and grounding of soul intensity. Let me know how you are responding if you choose to read these books and want to explore the second especially.

And so Holy Week begins today. I have been away from here for over three weeks, suffering with an energy-draining cold and cough. The energy is slower to come back.

This year I intend to fast from devices, checking email a couple of times a day instead of every time the notification goes off. I am taking a break from Facebook, inspiring as it often is. I intend to fast from availability to the phone by turning off the notification sounds altogether and by spending at least an hour a day, or more, outside in the March warming sun, watching the river rise, watching the snow melt. My fast will be from noise and doing into silence and slowing.

I am under no illusion of how difficult this will be, but it is not about achieving a perfect score. It is about staying faithful to the call of silence and deepening interior heart presence and the capacity for presence.

I came across this poetic reflection by Neale Donald Walshe yesterday in my journal of 30 November, 2014. For those of us who are sensing endings in ways of doing things, in Church and Religious Life, and in any other evolving situation, I believe that it summarizes what is necessary to know:

Yearning for a new way

will not produce it.

Only ending the old way can do that.

You cannot hold onto the old all the while

declaring that you want something new.

The old will defy the new

The old will deny the new

The old will decry the new.

There is only one way to bring in the new:

you must make room for it.

In the new light of spring, I have been pondering how to write about the experience of this year, a dropping away from work, a dropping into deeper presence of attention to what it takes to live an ordinary life. I still have nearly half a year, yet - a few days ago, I came across a short poem by Wendell Berry that made that resonant "whoosh" of recognition:

And the world cannot be discovered

by a journey of miles

no matter how long

but only by a spiritual journey,

a journey of one inch,

very arduous and humble and joyful,

by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,

and learn to be at home,

and learn to be at home.

This what I have been doing: "learning to be at home" in the ground beneath my feet. I have never been so. Never been so. There is always something more to do, somewhere else to go, someone else to become. In this true sabbath, all else is falling away except the journey inward and how it lives outward. I will be exploring this more in the future. I am only at a first step.