![]() On Clear Mind, Wild Heart you will join this acclaimed poet and teacher to engage with the poetic imagination as your companion and guide for the difficult terrain we are all traversing. Throughout the ages, teaches David Whyte, the language of poetry has held the power to lend us courage, to give us the vision of those who endured, and to hazard ourselves boldly at the fierce edges of our lives. ![]() Like this simple shape, the contemplative heart is found in the simplicity of everyday life."In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood, where the true way was wholly lost." When you find yourself without bearings, as Dante Alighieri voiced so well centuries ago, where will you look for guidance? Izzy Spitz, momentary peace (detail), digital oil pastels. Izzy Spitz, Chemistry of Self 3 (detail), digital oil pastels. Image credit: A path from one week to the next-Taylor Wilson, Ruah (detail), print. ![]() Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2019), 9–10, 10–11. In the midst of a world that is begging you to distract yourself, this is no easy practice. Encounters with the sacred that radiate from the core of the ordinary embolden you to cultivate stillness and simple awareness. So you sit down to meditate not only because it helps you to find rest in the arms of the formless Beloved but also because it increases your chances of being stunned by beauty when you get back up. When you walk with a purposeful focus on breath and birdsong, your breathing and the twitter of the chickadee reveal themselves as a miracle…. When you sit in silence and turn your gaze toward the Holy Mystery you once called God, the Mystery follows you back out into the world. The more you intentionally turn inward, the more available the sacred becomes. Starr connects these moments of awe to a renewed commitment to contemplative practice:Īnd this is why you cultivate contemplative practice. You have glimpsed the face of the Divine where you least expected it. Your soul has been formed in the forge of life’s losses, galvanized in the crucible of community, fertilized by the rain of relationship, blessed by your intimacy with Mother Earth. This is not what they taught you in the church of your childhood. Which is why seemingly ordinary moments like moonrises and lovemaking undo you. You long ago relinquished your need for cosmic order and personal control. You have lost yourself in heartbreak, then lost the desire to ever regain yourself, then lost your fear of death. You have experienced the unfettering of the subject-object distinction while holding your daughter’s hand as she labored to give birth to your grandson when curled up in bed with your dying friend … while yielding to your lover’s lips. This is not the first time you have disappeared into something beautiful. You resume stirring the sauce and setting the table. ![]() But the onions are burning, and so you turn away and cut your herbs and go back inside. It feels natural, and there is no other place you’d rather be. You are absorbed into the heart of the moon. Your gaze softens, and the edges of your individual identity fade. ![]() Scissors suspended in your hand, tears pooling at the corners of your eyes, you nearly quit breathing. She is full and golden, like one of those pregnant women who radiates from within. Maybe you’re making dinner and you step outside to snip chives from the kitchen garden just as the harvest moon is rising over the eastern slopes. Spiritual teacher and CAC friend Mirabai Starr poetically describes the contemplative experience that is stirred through regular lives, whether in nature, through relationships, or our suffering:Ĭontemplative life flows in a circular pattern: awe provokes introspection, which invokes awe. ![]()
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