Wisdom Counseling by Phone

You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts
sent to be delivered to a hungry world.
And as much as the world needs your cargo,
you need to give it away.
Everything depends on this.

But the world forgets its needs,
and you forget your mission,
and the ancestral maps used to guide you
have become faded scrawls on the parchment of dead Pharaohs.
The cargo weighs you heavy the longer it is held
and spoilage becomes a risk.
The ship sputters from port to port and at each you ask:
"Is this the way?"
But the way cannot be found without knowing the cargo,
and the cargo cannot be known without recognizing there is a way,
and it is simply this:
You have gifts.
The world needs your gifts.
You must deliver them.

The world may not know it is starving,
but the hungry know,
and they will find you
when you discover your cargo
and start to give it away.

                                                Greg Kimura

THIS SPACE IN BETWEEN

When I stop long enough
I hear the sounds of silence
When I sit myself down
I can begin to feel
Something

A yearning
A calling
A desire

I see a face
It is yours
The Other

The foreign one
The one I cannot mold
Into my projection

The Other who
Continually defines herself
To me

We define each other
With Yes and No
This is where I stop
Here is where you begin

I watch
With wide-eyed wonder
Never tired to say
This is me, that is you

Oh this dance
I never got to have
What beauty we create

I am more and more fierce
About these
Yeses and nos
More and more
Beguiled
Infatuated
Enhanced

By our dance

By the proximity
Of me to you
Of you to me

By the creative movement
We embrace

By the bond

By the yeses and nos

By the time past
And passing

By this space
In between

Indian Prayer

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glint on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain
When you wake in the morning hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight
I am the soft starlight at night
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I don not sleep

Missing Something

When here, I wish I were there
When there, I wish I were here
I can never rest
Moving from here to there
From there to here
Not wanting to miss a thing
Yet always missing the only thing I have
The here and now.

Lines from The Broken Jar

we have to dream further, all the way to the
   fountain, we have to row centuries upstream,
further than infancy, further than the beginning,
   further than the baptizing waters,
to throw down walls between person and person, to
   join anew that which is separated,
life and death are not worlds opposite, they are
   one single stalk with two twin flowers
                                                       Octavio Paz

blessed be the longing that brought you here
and quickens your soul with wonder.
may you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire
that disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.
may you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
to discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.
may the forms of your belonging - in love, creativity, and friendship -
be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.
may the one you long for long for you.
may your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.
may a secret providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.
may your mind inhabit your life with the sureness with which your body inhabits the world.
may your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.
may you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.
may you know the urgency with which god longs for you.

john o'donohue

Now is the time to know
That all that you do is sacred.
 
Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.
 
Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child's training wheels
To be laid aside
When you finally live
With veracity
And love.
 
Hafiz is a divine envoy
Whom the Beloved
Has written a holy message upon.
 
My dear, please tell me,
Why do you still
Throw sticks at your heart
And God?
 
What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?
 
Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.
 
This is the time for you to compute the
impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.
 
Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.