It occurs to me…

Photo taken on a recent walk.

This from Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart:

“The paradox:

All experience strips us of much except our sheer strength of mind, of spirit.

All experience reveals that upon these we must not fully depend.

Brooding over us and about us, even in the shadows of the paradox, there is something more –

There is strength beyond our strength, giving strength to our strength.

Whether we bow our knee before an altar or

Spend our days in the delusions of our significance,

The unalterable picture remains the same;

Sometimes in the stillness of the quiet, if we listen,

We can hear the whisper of the heart

Giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair.”

Photo taken of a shell-looking, reflective sculpture on the University of Texas campus near the Dell Medical Center. the red blotches are my running shorts.

Pointed by readings today in DeMello’s Awareness, I arrive at the slapping the forehead, the “I coulda had a V8” moment.

“Wisdom occurs when you drop the barriers you have erected through your concepts and conditioning.”

“If the heart is unobstructed, the result is love.”

So much time/effort in life is spent building, adding, filling in, yet many, perhaps most of the significant moments in life occur when we tear down, deconstruct, subtract, and/or remove and create (actually, recreate) a space for wisdom and love to settle in.

“Perspective” is a word that keeps coming to mind lately.  It is a complex word, one with lots of alternative meanings in any dictionary, some short and straightforward (“a mental view”), others longer, more complex (“the capacity to view things in their true relations and relative importance” or “the appearance to the eye of objects in respect to their relative distance and position”). Seemingly inherent in all the definitions is that there is no single perspective.  Somehow, what came to mind this morning was the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 11:15-32.  Same events, same facts, but oh my! – different perspectives as between the younger son, the older son, and the father.

Photo taken recently in Galveston.

Rereading one of my favorite books, Richard Ford’s Canada, and renewing my admiration for his writing.  This exchange between the main character (age 15, and in my top 5 book characters), Dell Parsons, and Mildred Remlinger:

“How do you know what’s really happening to you?”

“Oh, you never do…..  There are two kinds of people in the world…, well, really, there are lots of kinds.  But at least two are the people who understand you don’t ever know; then there’s the ones who think you always do.  I’m in the former group.  It’s safer.”

It occurs to me that I vacillate between the two groups – which in itself explains a lot.

From Mark Nepo – The Book of Awakening:

“Mysterious as it is – no matter our pain or excitement, our drama or circumstance – all that we could hope for is here.  We lack nothing.

The humble challenge of being human in not in agreeing or disputing this truth.  That is as fruitless as arguing against gravity.  Our humble way, if we can open it, is to root ourselves beneath the thousand dreams and excuses that keep us from the ground we walk.  Time and again, we are asked to outlast what we want and hope for, in order to see what’s there.  It is enough.”

A good phrase – “the thousand dreams and excuses that keep us from the ground we walk.”

Photo taken recently on the University of Texas campus.

From Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata:

“…and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.”

As I contemplate this line today it occurs to me that a constant failing is that of focusing on the messenger, not the message, or focusing on the receptacle, not the content.  There is some proof in Ehrmann’s line that this is a common malady.  I mean, is the “even the dull and ignorant” part even necessary.  The exhortation is really “listen to others, they too have their story” but there is this tendency to dismiss, not listen to, the story that comes in a package I don’t like.  There is, in effect, this pre-screening going on based on experience, bias, prejudice….  That is, experience be damned, I still believe I CAN judge a book by its cover because I am just that astute, that perceptive, that damn smart.  News Flash…!

Listen to others; they too have their story.  Not “your” story, but “their story.”  (Though it is surprising how often “their story” is, or at least intersects with, your story.)