Kundalini Splendor

Words

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other --
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper --
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always --
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

~ Dana Gioia ~

I have just listened to the Lynn McTaggart youtube presentation referred to below.  This is one of the most exciting and significant such talks I have heard in a very long time.  I also plan to participate in the ongoing group exercise she describes (beginning tomorrow at 10:a.m. Mountain time) and feel that what she is offering is a compelling way to help change the world!!
Listen to this video if you possibly can.  It could change your life, for it offers real possibilities for all of us wishing to bring positive change to our planet.
Love to all,
Dorothy

                       

One of our BEES&IANDS MEMBERS has recommended the new YOUTUBE by Lynne Mc Taggart,PhD, author of "THE FIELD" and a new book called "POWER of EIGHT".
The youtube location is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK6Ls76umnM&sns=em
~~~~~
Lynne Mc Taggart passionately describes the POWER OF INTENTION~~ and that participating in these group intentions has a long-term transformational quality about
them which emulates the after-effects of an NDE, or other spiritually transforming event!
We have heard of the TM (Transcendental Meditation) group efforts for peace, Heart Math recordings after 9/11, and other events -- Lynne presents much new data and
Our BEES&IANDS friend wishes to alert us to the Gaia.com "HEALING AMERICA: THE AMERICAN PEACE INTENTION EXPERIMENT~ Sept 30-Oct 5 at 10:00am Mountain Time each day -- gaia.com

Clearing ~ Martha Postlewaite

Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life
and wait there patiently,
until the song that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.

Earth Prayer

O Endless Creator, Force of Life, Seat of the Unconscious, Dharma,
Atman, Ra, Qalb, Dear Center of our Love, Christlight, Yahweh, Allah,
Mawu, Mother of the Universe…

Let us, when swimming with the stream, become the stream…
Let us, when moving with the music, become the music…
Let us, when rocking the wounded, become the suffering..

Let us live deep enough till there is only one direction…
and slow enough till there is only the beginning of time…
and loud enough in our hearts till there is no need to speak…

Let us live for the grace beneath all we want,
let us see it in everything and everyone,
till we admit to the mystery that when I look deep enough into you,
I find me,
and when you dare to hear my fear in the recess of your heart,
you recognize it as your secret, which you thought no one else knew…

O let us embrace that unexpected moment of unity as the atom of God…
Let us have the courage to hold each other when we break and worship what unfolds…

O nameless spirit that is not done with us,
let us love without a net beyond the fear of death
until the speck of peace we guard so well becomes the world…

        - Mark Nepo

ROB WERGIN IN DENVER

TRANSFORMATION EVENT

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8th
2:00 - 3:30 PM
Mile Hi Church
Vogt Auditorium
9077 W. Alameda Ave.
Lakewood, CO 80226

$20.00 at Door

ALL ATTENDEES WILL RECEIVE A HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE
I finally feel calm, peaceful and happy!
                                                                                                                      L.M., Denver
SIGN UP FOR SMALL GROUP SESSIONS



Registration required. Limited to 12 people per group.
SIGN UP FOR SUPER SMALL GROUP SESSIONS



Registration required. Limited to 8 people per group.

Everything is the Light

Nikola Tesla


I cannot cause light;
the most I can do is
try to put myself in
the path of its beam.

Annie Dillard

In the end
a person tires of
everything
except heart’s
desiring,
soul’s journey.

Rumi

Today I speak in this way, tomorrow in another,
but always the Path is beyond words and beyond mind.

Lao Tzu,  The Huahujing


I do not at all understand the mystery of grace––
only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

- Anne Lamott, in Traveling Mercies

What Should I Do?

What should I do?
I have known ecstasy.
I have been held close
to the beating heart of God.

The Mother has entered
my body, the veins,
carried me to other realms.

Who should I tell of this?
Who would be my confidante?

Always, there is mystery.
Never are there words.
My tongue is held down
by a ribbon of love.

Dorothy Walters
September 26, 2017

Jimmy Kimmel Fights Back Against Bill Cassidy, Lindsey Graham and Chris Christie
(Youtube)

If you have not yet watched this youtube presentation, you should do so at once.  Kimmel outlines in brilliant analysis what is wrong with the newest healthcare proposal and how Cassidy simply lied to him in his earlier interview,

Leland Melvin, ex-astronaut and NFL player, calls out Trump: have you no decency?

By Keith Pickering

Former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin, veteran of STS-122, STS-129, and the NFL, heard Donald Trump’s unhinged rant in Alabama last night, and had a few thoughts of his own. He jotted them down in an open letter that can be found on boingboing. Here’s the entire text — although I’ve added a few boldfaces of my own.

To Donald Trump

I believe in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of this country even though at the time they were drafted, their tenets of life, liberty justice for all and eventual freedom of speech, religion, assembly, press and petition amendment ratified in Dec 1791, only applied to a select group of people and not ones that looked like me.

Donald Trump, I listened to your Alabama rally rant and could not believe how easily you say what you say.

We have become numb to your outlandish acts, tweets and recent retweet of you knocking down Hillary Clinton with a golf ball that you hit.

Donald Trump, your boorish and disgusting actions are not funny. They actually promote violence against women especially when your followers act out what you say.

I used to walk the grounds of UVA in Charlottesville, VA as a graduate student only to watch in horror as those same grounds became a battlefield being trod by Nazi and anti-Semitic worshippers armed with assault style weapons ready to fight to make America White again. (their words). You actually said there were nice people on both sides. People armed and ready to kill other Americans for the purpose of eradicating Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Mexicans, Asians, Latinas and even the first real Americans, Native Americans to make America Great Again were “nice people”?

Comparing this to what you say in condemnation of an unarmed black man peacefully protesting by exercising his constitutional First Amendment rights by silently taking a knee is appalling, unnerving and reprehensible.

Today, you called Colin Kaepernick “a son-of-a-bitch.”

You said he should be fired.

You are calling his white mother a bitch.

The strong contrast in language for a black man and a Nazi is very telling. Do you have any sense of decency or shame in what you say to the American people that are part of your duty to serve respectfully with dignity, presidentially?

Our National Anthem has been edited to try not to offend, because when Francis Scott Key penned the song he watched freed slaves fighting for the British and wrote this stanza:

“And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

I guess if I were a slave back then I probably would have done anything to obtain freedom from my American oppressors who were whipping, killing, raping, dismembering, hanging or releasing the dogs on people like me all under our Constitution.

In 1814 former slaves fought with the British for their freedom from their American enslavers.

Key witnessed a battle from a ship off the Maryland shore at Fort McHenry, which inspired him to write what became our National Anthem.

I served my country not in the military, but as 1 of 362 American Astronauts that have explored the universe to help advance our civilization. Not just Americans, but all humans. I also was briefly in the NFL and stood for the National Anthem with my hand over my heart. What makes us great is our differences and respecting that we are all created equally even if not always treated that way.

Looking back at our planet from space really helps one get a bigger perspective on how petty and divisive we can be. Donald Trump, maybe you should ask your good friend Mr. Putin to give you a ride on a Soyuz rocket to our International Space Station and see what it’s like to work together with people we used to fight against, where your life depends on it. See the world and get a greater sense of what it means to be part of the human race, we call it the Orbital Perspective.

Donald Trump, please know that you are supposed to be a unifier and a compassionate and empathetic leader. If you can’t do the job then please step down and let someone else try. I pray that you do the right thing.

May God bless you.

Sincerely,

Leland Melvin
Former Astronaut and NFL Player
I’m sure many of us are reminded of Joseph Welch taking down Senator Joe McCarthy in 1954: “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

I think it is especially significant that people like Leland Melvin and Jimmie Fallon are speaking up.  More people will be attentive to them than to the NYT or the WP.  They are indeed courageous and do in fact "speak truth to power."

When I was young, I admired clever people.

Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.

God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance.

Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.

We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.

The course of life is unpredictable, no one can write his autobiography in advance.

Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.
Abraham Joshua Heschel

from Devta Singh

"I bow to the primal Guru, I bow to the truth has existed throughout the ages, I bow to true wisdom, I bow to The Great Divine wisdom."

(via Snatam Kaur)

Almost Midnight

It is almost midnight
and already I have stayed up too late,
reading this one's poem,
that one's account of meaningful encounter
with the inner immensity.
Glimpses of another's soul,
snapshots of someone else's truth.

Once more I will not be able
to rise early,
achieve all the essential tasks
I have listed,
many will have to be postponed
to yet another day,
a tally that ever grows longer.

Still, my mantra,
as always, is "I'm doing the best I can"
and then the other voice interrupts saying,
"not enough, never enough, hurry
and finish whatever it is."

I contemplate what I have achieved
this day
and the tab is short.

I wonder how I can do better,
complete the projects
that weigh me down
like a load of bricks tied to my back.

And I repeat,
"I am doing the best I can"
and then the refrain "it is never enough."

Dorothy Walters
September 3, 2017

RUMI AND THE SUFI PATH OF LOVE

Thursday Sept 21st at 6:00pm PT / 9:00pm ET

Please join Phil Cousineau for our next live global webcast
 (view program page)

with Kabir Helminski, a sufi sheikh of the Mevlevi tradition, is an author, a publisher, a musician and co-founder of the Threshold Society and the Baraka Institute
and

Parisa Soultani, host and co-producer of the OneThroughLove.org project, a gathering of Rumi “lovers” — scholars, dervishes, and other sufi teachers and practitioners from around the world.



​
​




Rumi and the Sufi Path of Love

When: September 21, 2017 6:00 PM PDT
Where: https://ovee.itvs.org/screenings/nlci8
Presented by: Global Spirit - CEM Productions
Duration: 69min 29sec

How does Islam embrace the concept of “love?"

How did Rumi, a 13th century sufi mystic from Central Asia, become the most widely read poet in the United States?

Why did UNESCO declare 2007 as “the year of Rumi?”

RUMI AND THE SUFI PATH OF LOVE takes viewers into the poetry and teachings of the renowned 13th century sufi philosopher and poet Jalaluddin Rumi. Almost 800 years ago, after a legendary meeting with a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz, Jalaluddin Rumi had a mystical experience which led him to the realization that all life, all existence and all creation are essentially united through the force of “eshgh” or Divine Love. Out of this realization, Rumi wrote some of the most beautiful and spiritually engaging poetry that has ever been written. To give texture, depth and a deeper understanding to the poetry and the philosophical teachings of Rumi, this GLOBAL SPIRIT program brings together two knowledgeable studio guests from different generations, cultures and linguistic traditions: Sheikh Kabir Helminski, a sheikh of the Mevlevi sufi tradition and Parisa Soultani, the Persian co-producer and host of the multi-lingual Rumi website: OneThroughLove.org

This program presents a number of evocative film segments from Turkey, Afghanistan and the USA, featuring well-known Rumi translators Coleman Barks and Andrew Harvey, Turkish sufi teacher Cemalnur Sargut, Persian Rumi scholar Dr. Elahi Ghomshei, Afghan musician Farida Mahwash, along with compelling footage of the “Sema” ceremony of the whirling dervishes and a “Zikr” ceremony led by Kabir Helminski. The program explores a number of engaging questions, including: What does Rumi’s poetry and message have to say about religious tolerance in today’s world? How to understand Rumi in the original Persian vs. modern, popular translations of Rumi? What happened when Rumi met Shams of Tabriz? What does Rumi bring to the concept of Love that is similar or different than what other great teachers, such as Jesus taught?

All you need to participate is a computer or iPad with a good internet connection. Before the event, you can click here (https://ovee.itvs.org/diagnostics) to run a test to ensure OVEE works properly on your computer.

Good News:  My phone is working again.  My fault.  I was not inserting the cable connection correctly and thus was getting no charge at all on the phone.!!!


Here is a link to a full description of the CONSCIOUSNESS SAMPLER:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3F0mhX6biy5VTJKZ1JvTDltT0k

Here is a brief summary of a meeting coming up on October 1:

Boulder BEEs and Boulder IANDS CONSCIOUSNESS SAMPLER

Various speakers will present for about 45 minutes each, to describe their personal unusual experiences, from shamanism to NDE to OOB and Kundalini awakening.  It will be quite interesting to those caring about unusual states of consciousness.

TIME:
9:30-4:30 p.m.
Speakers begin at 9:30am.  Seats available at 9:00am
All seats are first-come, first served at the door.  I speak 11:15-12:00.

LOCATION:
Boulder Inn Best Western Plus
Aspen Leaf Room, 770 28th Street, Boulder (north of Baseline,
east of US 36 on the 28th street frontage road)

COST:
$15.00 for all or part day

 I will be speaking on Spontaneous Kundalini Awakening and its similarity  to NDE experiences, plus the implications for evolution of consciousness at about 11:a.m. on Sunday, October 1.

There are 5 other speakers attendees may resonate with as well.

 Looking Back

Looking back,
I can say, yes, the journey
was never easy.

Somehow I kept losing the map,
got lost in jungles and swamps
of my own devising,
forgot where I had put
the instructions that someone
had given to me at the start.

Sometimes I met a friendly traveler,
and then maybe we enjoyed each other
for a time
and then each went our separate ways.

Often I assumed we would
companion each other forever,
but always that proved to be
a false hope.

Then things happened to me
that I could never explain.
An inner voice began to speak to me,
but there was never any way to share this
with others.

In fact, I and this presence
 communicated without words,
feeling was enough,
and I knew that at last I had found
the right way.

Together we move ahead,
never knowing what will
lie around the next bend,
what essence or thing
will appear after the next turning.

And it is enough.
A wise person once said
"The journey is the goal,"
 and indeed, that is so.
And thus I wait to see what
awaits us, what next unfolds.

Dorothy Walters
September 13, 2017

Often after the euphoria of the first awakening occurs, we must go back and deal with other still unresolved issues.  Lilla here writes about some of the difficulties she is now encountering.  This description is important, lest we might imagine that Kundalini brings only ecstasy and joy.  The whole nervous system has to be redone, and this part is never really easy.

Some Difficulties Along the Way

How delicious to hear from you. I don't know what's wrong with the blog address, it hasn't changed. I know that blog addresses need to be type in full to get a hit like this: https://kundalini-grace.blogspot.fr/.

Silktransit is me, this is a pseudo I chose when I signed up for Skype in 2006 and when I write a poem to Mother, this is how I sign it.

It's Unmasking the Rose I ordered then it was cancelled. I'd be delighted if you could send me a copy of your memoirs!

At the moment the kriyas are having a chronic fatique effect on the organism and lots of emotional, physical and mental layers are loosened. The body and mind and heart is like in a grip, collapsed, spasming.

Whenever I can I lie down. Or I'm literally forced to the ground and body / mind is incapacitated. After that there are hand movements and vocalizations. For hours or days loving emptiness and spaciousness. Sometimes dis-identification or detachment but love is always there
It's hard to describe as there's no subject that's there so it cannot really be dis-identified or detached from anything, it's rather a unification but without anyone being there..

Last Friday Mother had me turn from left to right like the whirling dervishes until my right hip was too sore to be able to stand. It was an hour before I finished work. I was in a classroom alone installing a software. I didn't get dizzy or nauseous at all. I lay down and felt the turning sensations subside in a few seconds. I got up. The middle part of the body felt empty, hollowed, spacious.

I tell my son when I need rest and so far this has worked. I take him out to the lake whenever I have enough strength. This is what I did this afternoon. I told him Id be lying down on the beach while he played. He wanted to show me something. I didn't turn my head but asked him if he could come to the other side so that I can see what he was showing. My eyes were closed.

I heard him talk in a mocking voice imitating what I had just said to him. Then he said "I'll throw a stone in your eye". I said to him, baby that's talking silly. The next moment my head got hit with a stone he threw at me.

I'm in a kind of emotional numbness mixed with anger, sadness, despair, sorrow and I feel something is collapsing and this already makes me feel lighter, freer and there's immense "I don't give a damn" and then there's the alive emptiness. Then Mother does what she wants and this is absolutely fine with me.

I'll dance until I become Dance itself
I'll cry until I become Sadness itself
I'll yearn until I become Yearning itself
I'll love until I become Love itself

Then I'll be no more, oh, then my heart will finally arrive where there is only You forever
Oh Heart the greatest
Oh Heart the most loving
Oh Heart the most compassionate



Oh Mother Divine, come to my abode!
Your will be done, hold me in your arms
My heart and soul adore you, I embrace you in love
Oh Beloved Mother, come to my abode!

Unbound me oh, Mother, set me free
Free me with your kisses and your Love
I pine and pine for you day and night
Envelope me in your love dearly




It's not so much that I love you
It's YOUR love that loves me

It's not so much that I feel your love
It is YOUR love that feels me

Time seems to be going backwards
shedding layer after layer

Until we are unborn into YOUR arms
whispering an endless prayer

-silktransit 16th June 2017




Oh Sweet Divine Mother, Beloved Father
My heart is wide open, let it be an altar
of your Holy Fire, set it ablaze
and let it burn oh just burn always

Oh Sweet Divine Mother, Beloved Father
My heart is wide open, let it be the keeper
of your Holy Fire, set it ablaze
and let it burn oh just burn always

Oh Sweet Divine Mother, Beloved Grace
My heart is wide open, burn it up oh please
so that everything I thought for real, perish
and only your Love in it flourish




Mother, sweet security
Protecting womb
Supporting earth
Safe and firm

Like a tree trunk, unmoved
in every wind and storm
Mother, sweet security
Mother, sweet security




39C° degrees outside
scorching heat
burning

39C° degrees inside
every heartbeat
blazing

since You birthed me into your womb
I love you
I love you consuming cosmic fire

I felt crushed by your love last night
even though there was nothing to be crushed
then crushedness lifted
space expanded peacefully
everything shone in your love

beautifully
beautifully

how LOVE feels
no one knows until they meet YOU
it burns it consumes it crushes
it lifts it expands it liberates
it makes little babies of pure LOVE

just to love you passionately
just to love you deeply and madly

to love YOURSELF
infinitely

-silktransit 12 june 2017




it's here to stay
embraces strongly
and whispers:

"I am here"
come and play...
everything is here already

-silktransit 20 September 2016

Lilla Botik has had one of the most amazing and indeed astonishing Kundalini awakening experiences of anyone I know.  She write about it eloquently in the following entry from her blog, dated July 14 of this year.  Her poetry is breathtaking, and many of her blog entries contains these poems.  She is indeed a mystic of a high order, one able to share her experience as a gift to all of us.  Her blog site is Kundalini.grace.blogspot.fr

Our Beloved Mother Shakti awakened in my body in spring 2014. I was 39. Spontaneously, without having heard about Kundalini or seeking it. Six months prior to the event, I had an urge to make a clean slate. To forgive all hurt and everyone in my life. Which I did. It didn't matter any more, I felt something was pushing me to let go although I didn't know what. Growing up and just being a human was not easy for me. A separation from my twin sister at the age of 9 due to parental divorce caused me a split of self, PTSD and anxiety - depression, all undiagnosed until I was 30. I felt that I was forever separated from my own self, therefore from everybody else on a deeper level, including my intimate partners. Therefore I was separate from the Universe.

I felt this separation always. I believed this would never change. I lived a successful life, learned languages, worked in different countries in languages and in IT. Things were going well on the outside. A friendly, helpful, kind person. Inside, it was pain, pain, pain and utter despair. I was to smile, or die - I thought. I had continuous suicidal thoughts, at times suicide attempts, general self-hate and the "I do not want to be here" feeling. I was on Prozac on and off for 12 years even before the official diagnosis.

Being very curious from a young age, I was fascinated by the universe and from the age of 12 my quest was to know it. In my teens it was religion then when I abandoned that, I went straight to quantum physics. I was open to everything but as an agnostic. I felt the most honest thing is that I don't know, I cannot know from a limited consciousness and limited senses the Universe at large. Still there was always a childlike wonder at the Universe and how beautiful it is and how it functions, the complexity, the surprises science have about it and the endlessness of it.

Then three months prior to the awakening, the "trances" came immediately after I started listening to a short guided chakra meditation before going to sleep. Somehow I didn't make the connection between the two. I called them trances as I learned a very simple self-hypnosis technique back in 2007 in London from Valerie Austin to help me go to sleep by going into a light trance. Most times, I could only fall asleep if I repeated 'Mom' and thought of my mother as she was the only one who could console me all my life when I was in distress.The trances became deeper.and deeper, even in daylight, spontaneously or just getting into the mood of it. It was a light that started expanding and enveloped my whole being and often the room and beyond. It had a very relaxing and loving presence.

The first time I sensed the loving light and presence I asked, why I am here? The answer was: to see and to heal. I thought it was the subconscious that answered. I became happier and happier, started embracing everyone, then all living beings and started to fall in love with something not knowing what. The bliss intensified often culminating in the feeling of floating in the air or flying, ecstasy, inner orgasm in pelvic area which rose to the heart. I dived in all this. Like a child. Unknowingly, with complete trust. There was never a question raised or wanting to find out what this was. It was something I never experienced before and yet it was all I ever dreamed of but thought I could never feel that. True uncaused happiness. Connectedness. Unconditional love.

Without knowing what it was, Grace came one afternoon as I was sitting in my car waiting for my aqua-gym class to start. I lay back just to relax until the doors opened when suddenly I started sobbing. Something was gripping my heart, my mind, my whole being. Then wow, the Infinite was in my head and said: Closer and pulled me towards It. It was infinitely strong and infinitely tender at once. Then I knew that All is One. Not intellectually but in reality, I became That and everything was THAT. The One. Then it moved to my heart and I felt what Oneness was. Words cannot describe it. Then it moved downwards to my sexual organs and the body physically became one with the ONE. Then I felt something stir in my genitals.

As it moved, the whole Universe moved with it. It rose up in waves undulating from side to side in my belly, blowing huge energies from certain points in the middle of the body, the stomach, the heart, the throat each buzzing and expanding, feeling like cosmic bliss and ecstasy. Then when it arrived in the head, the head blissfully exploded everywhere in the universe and the energy in the form of a tornado and with a similar force blew through the fontanel and exited into the Universe when all of my being and the Universe became united. I was simultaneously conscious of the body and everything else in the universe. It felt infinitely free and oh so pure. It was a sort of "I am everything" without the "I", like pure existence, beingness.

The whole event lasted about 15 minutes. The only thing I knew then that something very transcendental happened. A heightened and extremely sensitive state stayed for a whole month.I vibrated for a week so much that I became exhausted and after driving home from work I lay on the bed on my stomach and I said: "I don't know what this is, do what you want", then Shakti, the Divine Mother manifested at this instant, the Cosmic Womb, Universal Mother as an infinite womb everywhere which looked like wafts of velvety clouds of galaxies in pinks - oranges - purples very much resembling photos of a woman's womb where the baby is growing. I was a baby in that Womb seeing all that and looking down I noticed a huge, grayish umbilical cord going from under my belly button into Her, the Infinite Cosmos.

I literally came to existence from non-existence there and then and instantly recognized Her as my real Mother and said oh, it's You, Mother, Mother Universe. I fell in love with Her instantly. Or rather, Her love fell into me. She gave me birth then. I'm Her child. Since then, this theme is ongoing, the transformation is becoming and being Her child, I didn't know how universal, encompassing and present in all religions was what had happened to me. A few weeks later I watched the Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds movie and found out about Her as Kundalini Shakti (upward current) and Universal Consciousness as Grace, Holy Spirit or Shiva (downward current). Thus, East and West were reconciled as complementary to each other and unified.

The amount of Love, tenderness, consolation and support she gives day and night is enormous. And correction, if needed. My life has completely changed. I became single. From about 10 month into the Awakening She started teaching me how to manage and offer my sexual energy to Her so that She can do the transformative processes of the body-mind-heart. I later found out this is called Tantra. I have no formal training either in yoga or meditation or any esoteric studies.

A few months after the awakening, she led me different prayers / meditations on the heart and I finally settled on the Sufi heart meditation which I practiced daily for two years between 2015 and 2016. The results were some wild and beautiful, heart-wrenching and heart-expanding experiences. There are a lot of spontaneous movements and inner movements almost all the time but especially when I think of Her. I feel the tension building then just let the contortions, grimaces, heaving, crying, groans and sighs occur then oh, the bliss and the love come. So strongly sometimes that it puts the body into a seeming paralysis...

At the same time, I knew I had to face the split-off self which I avoided for decades. I was so afraid of the pain I thought that would break my heart so definitely, I wouldn't survive. The separate, split-self fused in the upward movement of the awakening and later when She called, I went in the mind and heart to meet that blessed child, with a bit of fear but She was with me. That took me some two years of constant work to let go of the pain of separation but nothing compares to the beauty of that inner work and the wonderful healing which is felt each time and at the end makes unconditional love, bliss and ecstasy a permanent feature in one's life.

I haven't yet had a teacher or Master apart from Her, the biggest Teacher. Her Presence and teachings are felt all the time. After a year-long break, I have a full time job and I'm raising my young child. This fits in perfectly with my life. She is Everything to me. She makes all the decisions. She literally spring-cleans the body, subconscious and heart all the time and educates me so it's like a continuous practice without actually doing anything it seems. I always want to learn from Her but mostly being in Her Embrace like a child. More than ever, I want to be with her at all times or rather disappear, dissolve in Her, so there's only Her.

I'm still a baby. In the past three years I was pretty much alone with this but felt ever so increasingly happy, balanced and healed so it didn't matter. It's early days for me to say anything... What I do know, and I may be in the minority that Kundalini and Grace are just so ecstatic and gentle, loving, heart-opening and so so so positive that I cannot even begin to describe it. What about those not-so-pleasant symptoms people talk about? I know how the heart aches when it opens and when Beloved Mother opens up the individual / collective subconscious it's not easy to see and feel what's in it. When you go in, even with trepidation, it's already the healing that's taking place.

Blessings to you and wish you all a wonderful seeking / awakening / transformation!

Announcement:  I got my iPhone up and running, but then the screen went dark last night.  I am trying to get it operational again.

Kit Kennedy, my poet friend in San Francisco, sent me this picture of Haiku, her cat, resting on "Some Kiss We Want."  What wonderful taste he has!  I decided that maybe I could sell the book as a kitty resting spot.

What Will Remain

When you leave
your medals and your ribbons
will not go
with you.

Your letters of commendation,
your framed list of degrees and attainments,
the contests you won––
these will all be
left behind.

What will remain
is some sort of half memory,
some kind of recollection
of someone you loved
and who loved you
in return.

The runaway at the corner
that you gave a coin to
on your way to work,
the addict pleading for
a bit of change
that you paused and encouraged,
the woman who came to clean
that you listened to carefully
while she told you her sorrows.

Somehow they will all be there,
wavering figures from your past,
like images imprinted on melting wax,
faded photographs shut
in your drawer.

They will open their arms
as you draw near.
You will accept their embrace
and finally feel love without
restrictions,
endless, replete,
love without cause
or purpose beyond itself.

Dorothy Walters
September 6, 2017

Kate Millett, Ground-Breaking Feminist Writer, Is Dead at 82

By PARUL SEHGAL and NEIL GENZLINGERSEPT. 6, 2017

Kate Millett at her home in Sacramento in 1974. Credit Jill Krementz, all rights reserved
Kate Millett’s first and most famous book, “Sexual Politics” (1970), is credited with inciting a Copernican revolution in the understanding of gender roles, but it began life somewhat unobtrusively, as a doctoral thesis. And its author was a somewhat reluctant standard-bearer for the new feminism.

Ms. Millett, who died on Wednesday in Paris at 82, was freshly out of a job, fired from her teaching position at Barnard College for her role in organizing student protests in 1968, and she worked furiously to develop her arguments into a book. She passed with distinction (although one adviser complained that reading her work was like “sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker”), and the book, published by Doubleday, became a sensation.

“Sexual Politics” sold 10,000 copies in a fortnight. Time magazine called Ms. Millett “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation” and featured her on the cover, with a portrait by Alice Neel. Along with Ti-Grace Atkinson and Shulamith Firestone, she became a defining architect of second-wave feminism.

“Sexual Politics” combined literary criticism, historical analysis and passionate polemic. In close readings of writers like D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller — the so-called champions of sexual liberation — Ms. Millett traced contempt and outright hatred of women.

Freud’s theory of “penis envy” came in for withering critique; so too did Norman Mailer and his anxious regard for masculinity. (“Precarious spiritual capital in need of endless replenishment and threatened on every side,” Ms. Millett called it.)

Some of her targets fired back. Mailer lampooned her in “The Prisoner of Sex” as “the Battling Annie of some new prudery.”

The “Sexual Politics” project, Ms. Millett told Time, “got bigger and bigger until I was almost making a political philosophy.” From depictions of the sexes in literature, she examined how women were socialized to accept, even defend, their lower status in society, a process she called “interior colonization.”

“It is interesting,” she wrote in “Sexual Politics,” “that many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.”

She examined how patriarchy had been developed and then defended, by law, medicine, science, schools.

“Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family,” she wrote. “It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole.”

She added: “As the fundamental instrument and the foundation unit of patriarchal society, the family and its roles are prototypical. Serving as an agent of the larger society, the family not only encourages its own members to adjust and conform, but acts as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state, which rules its citizens through its family heads.”

The New York Times called the book “the Bible of Women’s Liberation” and “a remarkable document because it analyzes the need and nature of sexual liberation while itself displaying the virtues of intellectual and emotional openness and lovingness.”

But it was also met with fierce criticism, notably by Irving Howe, who, in Harper’s Magazine, described it as “a figment of the Zeitgeist, bearing the rough and careless marks of what is called higher education and exhibiting a talent for the delivery of gross simplicities in tones of leaden complexity.”

The book displayed such scant interest in children, he wrote, that “there are times when one feels the book was written by a female impersonator.”

Ms. Millett died while on vacation with her spouse, Sophie Keir, with whom she had had a relationship of many years; they recently married. Ms. Keir said by email that the cause was cardiac arrest. The two had been going to Paris annually to celebrate their birthdays, she said, adding that Ms. Millett had had long ties to the women’s movement in France.

Ms. Millett was an artist as well as a writer and had established an art colony at a farm in LaGrange, N.Y., splitting time between that home and an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Besides Ms. Keir, she is survived by two sisters, Sally Millett Rau and Mallory Millett Danaher.

Ms. Millett was born on Sept. 14, 1934, in St. Paul. Her mother, the former Helen Feely, sold insurance to support the family after her father, James, had left.

Ms. Millett graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1956 and then went to Oxford. She pursued her art career in Japan and New York, and married the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965. (They divorced in 1985.)

Photo

Ms. Millett at her home in Manhattan in 1999. Credit Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
The attention that came with “Sexual Politics” was not something she adjusted to easily.

“Kate achieved great fame and celebrity, but she was never comfortable as a public figure,” Eleanor Pam, another leading feminist, said by email. “She was preternaturally shy. Still, she inspired generations of girls and women who read her words, heard her words and understood her words.”

The success of the book provoked a backlash among feminists that Ms. Millett found devastating. She came out as a lesbian the year the book was published, but lesbians in the feminist movement denounced her for not coming out sooner.

The personal stayed political for Ms. Millett, who in later years would write memoirs about her career and sudden fame (“Flying”, 1974), her sexuality (“Sita,” 1977), her mental health (“The Loony Bin Trip,” 1990) and her relationship with her mother (“Mother Millett,” 2001).

But her reputation and footing in the world were never secure. “Sexual Politics” stayed out of print for years. In 1998, she wrote an essay in The Guardian titled “The Feminist Time Forgot.” She described her difficulty finding work and the suicides of other prominent feminists of the time. We “haven’t been able to build solidly enough to have created community or safety,” she wrote.

Since the publication of a new edition of “Sexual Politics” last year, there has been renewed appreciation for Ms. Millett and how her work has shaped cultural studies and criticism.

“Her book exploded the tidy conceit in which I had been schooled: that literary criticism and social politics were things apart from one another,” Rebecca Mead wrote in an afterword to the new edition.

Writers like Rebecca Solnit and Maggie Doherty have shown how debates about the sexist depictions of characters owe much to Ms. Millett’s thinking.

“‘Sexual Politics’ may have its intellectual and political flaws, like any text that documents a way of thinking proper to the past,” Ms. Doherty wrote in The New Republic last year. “But what Millett’s work showed were the ways that political action and cultural expression interpenetrate. Both sites of struggle were necessary to bringing about the ‘altered consciousness’ that, for Millett, would mark a sexual revolution and bring ‘a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit.’

“We’re not out of this desert yet; in some ways we are more lost than ever,” Ms. Doherty continued. “But culture, Millett taught us, may help us find our way to a better land.”

Gloria Steinem said that Ms. Millett and “Sexual Politics” had sounded a call.

“Kate was brilliant, deep, and uncompromising,” she said in an email. “She wrote about the politics of male dominance, of owning women’s bodies as the means of reproduction, and made readers see this as basic to hierarchies of race and class. She was not just talking about unequal pay, but about woman-hatred in the highest places and among the most admired intellectuals. As Andrea Dworkin said, ‘The world was asleep, but Kate Millett woke it up.’ ”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Kate Millett was a major influence in my life and in fact the impact of her ground breaking work is now apparent in all of our lives.  When she published her book, "Sexual Politics," we were given a new way to view society and to question the assumptions we had lived by to that date.  I was teaching women's studies at a time when many women were discouraged from attending college, often by their own husbands.  I also remember such things as one women whose husband insisted that he should control her property, since that was the proper role of the husband.  I also recall one woman who became very upset to learn that when women were treated as equals, a female might be hired instead of her husband.  One husband threatened to sue our department as the "co-respondent" in his wife's suit for divorce.
Much that we take for granted today had to be looked at and overturned in those heady years when women finally found their own voices and stepped forward to claim their true identities as equal partners in a society long dominated by males through the patriarchy, a word we had not heard of but now recognized as the basis of our social structures.
I am sorry that many younger women do not know who Kate was as a revolutionary thinker of her time.  Many of the freedoms we take for granted now exist because of her courage as a pioneer stepping up to challenge the power structures of the time.  And of course there were others as well who drove the new movement for women's equality.

(photo from internet)

The Awakening

What I gave up
to write certain pieces
was my skeptical eye,
my rapier wit,
the attitude I had assumed to puncture
my own adolescent view of life
with the sharp stiletto of my mind.

What I sacrificed
was the joy
of deconstruction,
the pleasure of deflation
of the sentimental,
the flowery,
the inept.

What I gained
was a new way of looking,
a means to know
that spirit was paramount,
that kindness was more valuable
than sensibility,
that feeling took precedence
over analysis,
that, yes, love was in fact the
answer,
that we are all one
like it or not,
and I did not know everything
and in fact knew very little
about anything,
and was grateful
for my illumination,
and so now give thanks
to "whomever it may concern."

Dorothy Walters
August 26, 2017

(When we go to graduate school and thus are initiated into academia, it is easy to imagine that we are somehow superior to many others, for indeed we have certain insights and particular points of view that set us apart from the rest.  We tend to be judgmental and measure others by their sensibilities rather than their innate goodness of character.  If we are lucky, we outgrow these elitist views and relate to others in a different way, one that sees such traits as kindness and compassion as valuable indicators of true merit.
However, I want to add that I value education as such and feel it is important to learn to think and know and learn from the wisdom of our ancestors.  I simply would like to see teaching prize lessons of spirit and body as well as those of the mind, and thus enable us to grow into the fullness of what we are.) 

(image from internet)

"The Spirit is a Passage"
                   (Robinson Jeffers)

And indeed, that is how it is,
one lane leading on to another,
one channel to another opening.

Each time we moved on
we thought we had arrived.
But each arrival
was merely a beginning,
a new chapter unfolding,
a new vista to capture
our attention,
each moment leading into the next
as if it had been prepared
from an invisible script,
and we the struggling travelers,
coping as best we could,
knowing there would never be
a final goal,
only more endings, more times
of starting over,
always a new discovery,
another termination,
always all in medias res.

Dorothy Walters
September 9, 2017

The Lover

The red gold labia
of the rose,
already beginning to
wither and curl,
how beautiful,
even as death
offers a kiss.

Are You the Friend
or are You the Beloved?
Who cares what name
You bring?
It is only your touch
that matters.

Some call it a tavern,
some a chapel.
God is everywhere.

Take this breast
into your mouth
and drink.
Let your tongue
taste God.

Dorothy Walters
(from 2008)

(photo by N. M. Rai)

Notice:  I have purchased an iPhone but don't yet know how it operates.  I am currently without any phone service but hope to get help soon.

September 7, 2017

 Anam Cara Meditation Foundation
 Perennial Wisdom For The Soul's Journey

Dear Dorothy,

As mainstream interest in meditation continues to grow, the foundational practices of mindfulness, breath awareness, yoga asanas, etc. are being integrated into businesses, schools, churches, temples, hospitals, treatments centers, clinical psychology and more.

Scientific research has produced thousands of studies showing the benefits of meditation for health, brain functioning, relationships, pain reduction, and the list goes on and on. Interestingly, from a meditative perspective, these are all side-effects of meditation and not the real focus of such practices. Even while enjoying these beneficial side-effects, we can remain aware of the real goal of meditation practice.

Buddha didn't meditate to lower his cholesterol. Shankaracharya didn't meditate to increase the cortical thickness of certain areas of his brain. Lady Yeshe didn't meditate to enhance her leadership skills. St. Theresa of Avila didn't meditate for peak performance.

The goal of meditation is to know the highest. We may like to give that a name - Yahweh, God, Goddess, Self, bodhichitta, Shiva, Great Spirit, Allah, Kali, and the list of names goes on and on. Carl Jung framed it as the transcendent function that is inherent to our psyche. We project that as the deity to which we are attracted and seek union, which is truly union with our own highest nature. This is the highest goal of meditation. There are beginning goals to the practice of meditation which are succeeded by other goals as the transformative process of meditation deepens, yet we must never lose sight of the ultimate goal of knowing the highest, the infinite, the boundless love and compassion that is the root nature of all Being. Come to rest in that pure Presence and all striving, all seeking, ceases. Encounter the One, the Knower who is never known.

Then the living state of meditation opens and embraces all of your life. Meditative practices are intermittent, while the state of meditation is continuous and subsumes all of our experiences, whether we are awake and active, asleep and dreaming, or lulled by the dark embrace of deep sleep.

Meditation practice can lead to that full knowledge and the state of radical freedom that unfolds as a result. In this way we go beyond the health and wellness models of meditation to the true intent of meditation.

 Kali's Bazaar penned by Kalidas

The Knower

Darkness is secondary.
Who is the Knower
Who illumines all darkness?

Light is secondary.
Who is the Knower
Who illumines even the sun?

Mystery is secondary.
Who is the Knower
Who penetrates all mysteries?

Knowledge is secondary.
Who is the Knower
Who is the source of all knowledge?

Wisdom is secondary.
Who is the Knower
The wellspring of wisdom
from whom all scriptures have come?

Pleasure and suffering are secondary.
Who is the Knower
The stainless One untouched by
desire and attachment,
who looks upon all with love and compassion?

Form and emptiness are secondary.
Who is the Knower
In whose clear and boundless
Light of awareness
Form and emptiness embrace?

Birth and death are secondary.
Who is the Knower
The One, unborn
undying, eternally pure?

O my Beloved,
Tat Twam Asi!
Thou art That!

Kalidas p.79

 Living Meditation: Deepening & Integrating Practices
 Retreat: Oct. 6-8, 2017 Wisdom House, Litchfield, CT

Led by Lawrence Edwards, PhD, poet, author, mentor and teacher.

Living Meditation will take you into the rich meditative practices and teachings found at the most profound levels of the great spiritual traditions, where the ultimate state of non-dual awareness is all that exists. In this retreat you will learn to deepen and integrate meditation into everyday life. Meditation uplifts our work life, our home life, our health and all that we engage in.

Meditation begins as a set of practices and then the transformative power of meditation processes becomes apparent as we shed old conditioned patterns of mind. The transformative processes develop and ripen, opening the boundless domain of the state of Living Meditation, also known as sahaja samadhi, in which every aspect of our life is transformed.

In this retreat you will learn how to deepen your practices, further empower the transformative process of meditation and discover the state of radical freedom, the state of Living Meditation. This is the state of the Living Presence that already exists within you as your true nature. Some call this their Buddha nature, or their Christ nature, or their Divine Self, but whatever we call it, it is beyond words, beyond the mind, yet at the very heart of our Being. Come to know your state of radical freedom, come to know the living presence of the One.

This retreat incorporates the classic forms of Shaktipat diksha and the unique Maha Kali Yantra empowerment. Everyone is welcome to attend. No prior experience is necessary.

Registration is limited to facilitate learning. Please register early to be ensure a space.

Come and enjoy a glorious fall weekend in New England!

Reserve your place now!
Click here for more information and to register.

Open Meditation Program: 7:15pm on the 2nd & 4th Thursdays
The next programs are 9/14/17 and then 9/28.

2 Byram Brook Place, Armonk, NY 10504.
914-219-8600
All are welcome! No registration needed.

Everyone has the heart to be a true friend of the soul, an "Anam Cara." By embodying that ideal we may serve to help others to find love and compassion within themselves and the world.

Our highest nature is always manifest in relationship - to all other beings, to the environment, community, loved ones, and in relation to our own body and mind. Becoming mindful of the quality of our relationships allows us to learn where the light shines and where it needs to shine more. The ideal of Anam Cara is to continuously endeavor to expand the depth and the inclusiveness of the loving kindness we bring into every relationship, every moment, every breath.

If you have any suggestions, comments or sharings, for our newsletter please don't hesitate to e-mail me and I'll do my best to respond.

I thank you all.

May all beings know complete freedom from suffering and may all our actions reflect only wisdom, compassion, patience and love.

email: info@anamcara-ny.org
phone: 914-219-8600
web: http://www.anamcarafoundation.org

The Artist

There is a certain kind of woman
who comes onstage to  sing
or play.

She is not wearing a fancy dress
or high heeled shoes.
She is a bit awkward
in her walk.

She does not have high
cheekbones,
and her hair needs a trim up.
Maybe she is not even
wearing makeup.
Probably she needs
to lose a few pounds.

But when she begins to play
(or sing)
everyone suddenly wakes up.
She is clearly special,
someone with a gift.
Obviously she has spent
countless hours
perfecting her art.
 Her delivery is flawless.
But something more than technique
is involved here,
some kind of mystery or puzzle of accomplishment.
Now all we can do
is listen in rapture,
wondering how so much
talent can be packaged
into such an unlikely
container.
She is chosen.

Dorothy Walters
September 7, 2017

Ann Krohn Rick––prose poem

(from Dorothy)
Many years ago, my friend Ann Krohn Rick visited Ithaca, New York, home of Cornell University and the Corning Glass  Museum.  Both made a major impression on her, yielding a transcendent experience of exultation and joy.    She herself is a singer and
"sings Empty into the world."  She explained to me that  Ithaca sits over a "river of slate" from the Devonian Age, or the Age of Fishes.  She said that the Corning Glass Museum was the best museum she had ever seen.  This entry is culled from her journal, which describes that memorable experience.  For me, the poem suggests Whitman with his exultant flow of imagery.

(from Ann)
 Ithaca is graced with amazing geology, black slate from the Devonian Age, or the Age of Fishes, when water was breathed by organisms, not air. Ithaca is home to Cornell University, and an amazing river runs through the center of it, cutting through slate, deep.

        My trip also included Corning NY, where corningware was conceived and made, and I visited the best museum I’ve ever seen, and that is saying a lot since I’ve been to Europe. The Corning Glass Museum made a deep impression on me. Glass blowing was part of the exhibit. Slowly a correspondence formed between Holy Breath and the Love Stream itself, linked by the Age of Fishes, when water was breath. 

        Singing Empty into the World is something I do, as does the mountain thrush in the below excerpts from my journal. Yet beyond even our “arts” the Beads represent Incarnate Form itself. By Being, full and Radiantly Conscious, we are beads linked to the Inexhaustible Love Stream/Song.



Maybe something Big wants to Word Itself through me
The Godded-Human comes thundering down

Earth you have made obsidian. Together forge us crystal.


Cornell, Corning, Corazon del Mundo

Under Ithaca

Begin my friend, where all good journeys end, at Ithaca N.Y., Cornell Campus, Sage Hall, under that flowering tree.
Shouldering humid blocks of mid-summer heat, oppressive, tight, and academic rush-rush of contrived inquiry, the Surface World.
Friend, let me show you the unnoticed gate, Cascadilla Slate, the Love Stream, flowing under Ithaca. Hurling open-throated vowels up onto the street
A rage, a crystal torrent
 Cascading Crystal
Surging Song
under Ithaca, hidden
causeways bursting into
chasms sending open-throated
vowels clattering down
night streets
under Cornell
Gorges of black obsidian slate

(River can I take you back in the cupped hands of Words?)

Mountain Thrush

Mountain Thrush,
Sound rounding out and
Containing the curves of canyons
your Empty fills, and billows out
Stone.
Bird call clear as Crystal
Maker of Worlds
Opener of Empty

Even the stunned sedges at
water’s edge
opening outward their inner otherness
Big and slow our passage here
lugubrious we walk and meet the water
Friend
breath at the core of form
beads of birdsong
Liquid Breath, liquor
  The Love Stream
Take these word-beads/bird weeds
hissing in the rush grass
Pierce your Ears with them or pierce your Hearts
because Adorning I Adore you

From Cornell to Corning, Water to Air

Open throated culverts
singing out into this dark night,
carving the contours of canyons
pour forth your presence
  gouging gorges
Devonian
back when breathing was water
before air’s oxidizing axes hacking
back when breath was water
Come my Friend
Take my hand
Move through this charmed space, stunned and
underwater
This space never knew it was
so big
expanding on the sheaves of Song
Let me take you from Cornell to Corning

The Glass Factory

The glass factory
Masters blowing baubles
Form with a breath at the center
the glass factory at Corning

They say glass is neither liquid, gas or solid
Bonds between atoms break
apart and cool so quickly there is not time to reorganize
Take sand, soda, lime, apply intense heat,
frozen in disordered arrangement
A solid liquid

Form with breath at the center
(back when breathing was water)
master glass blower
Hallowing out a hollow
form with breath at the
center
Dropping word beads hot off
The spinning spindle
Stranding beads

Corazon del Mundo

River in the Heart Cave, can I
take you back in the cupped
hands of Words?
Friend, how is it that we are Here?
What Grace is this?
Throw yourself down in gratitude
And learn to string beads if you can.

Take these word-beads
quickly coagulating
dangling
from a strand of Song
Sand blast glass
melted oozing blood-red harden
Inspired with impurity
the alloyed allies of
Pain, of incarnate
compassion and Our Choice
to Love

Pierce your Ears with them
Or pierce your Heart
Because Adorning I Adore you.

Ann Krohn Rick

(image from internet)

When They Came

When they came,
some rushed forth to welcome them,
invited them to brunch.

Others got their shotguns
and other more powerful weapons,
determined to destroy the enemy,
an eminent threat.

Congress got deadlocked,
could not reconcile their contrasting
opinions,
finally went home to poll their supporters
to determine what their chances
were in the next election,
and to collect contributions.

And some denied that anything
unusual was happening,
claimed the event was fake news,
a hoax concocted by the opposition,
keep on watching the game
on their sets.

Dorothy Walters
September 5, 2017

"The saddest people I meet are those doing unsuitable work." (paraphrase)

John O'Donohue

(And by this he means work that drains them, takes away their own spirit of life, and depletes them of the inspiration and courage to claim their true identity.)

Before Galileo

You think you are
the center of everything.
Those planets and galaxies
their dizzy spirals
and loops,
their constant circling around
endless space—
you imagine they are a light show
constructed for your benefit—
and you are at the very midpoint,
the way earth itself was
before Galileo set us straight.

What indeed would you do
if this proved to be the case?
Would you tilt this way and that
to see if your universe went off center
with you?
Would you shrink into an atom
to see if your world would follow,
miniaturize itself?

Listen, there are a thousand billion
universes out there
and you are just a tiny speck
on one exceedingly small rounded
sphere
hurling itself out into the immensity.

You think that your moods and
intuitions guide everything
around you,
that you are the creator
of endless voyaging
and arrival—
you are the molecule
that defines all existence,
for the currents of the universe
flow constantly through you—

and they do,
they do,
and you are,
you are.

Dorothy Walters
From:  Some Kiss We Want

(image from internet)

Tell me About Shambala

Tell me about Shambala,
Atlantis, Lemuria,
all those ancestral realms.

Describe those beings now arriving here
from some other planet, dimension,
or sphere.

I want to believe,
oh, yes, I would love
to believe
all of this amazement,
every detail and scrap.

But something holds me back,
won't let me enter
those fabled kingdoms
now gone,
encounter those presences
that are they say quite real.

What I can believe in
is a faceless bodiless
essence that visits
from time to time.

I have no proof
of this invisible reality
and when I try to explain to others,
they shift about uneasily,
turn their backs,
change the subject.

I do not know
where this mystery comes from,
where it goes when it leaves.

Sometimes I think I derive
from a place unheard of,
unmarked on any map.

How I got here
I do not know,
nor where I will arrive when  I depart:
at present I am a temporary inhabitant of that place
marked "Forbidden.  Do not enter."

Dorothy Walters
September 1, 2017

(image from internet)

Invisible Visitors

By David Budbill

All through August and September
            thousands, maybe
tens of thousands, of feathered
            creatures pass through
this place and I almost never see
            a single one. The fall
wood warbler migration goes by here
            every year, all of them,
myriad species, all looking sort of like
            each other, yellow, brown, gray,
all muted versions of their summer selves,
            almost indistinguishable
from each other, at least to me, although
            definitely not to each other,
all flying by, mostly at night, calling to each
            other as they go to keep
the flock together, saying: chip, zeet,
            buzz, smack, zip, squeak—
            those
sounds reassuring that we are
            all here together and
heading south, all of us just passing
            through, just passing
through, just passing through, just
            passing through.