Extravagant Stillness by Mirabai Starr,

“Be patient, my heart.
The time of the cave is coming.
The season of quiet.
The deep drink of stillness
you have been thirsting for.
Secret, luminous darkness.
Fruitful, radiant night.

Your access has been paid.
All year you have made
an offering of your life,
Flung your treasures into the
clamoring hands of the world.
You have lost yourself in the lyrics,
Recollected yourself in the silence,
Forgotten again and again
where you come from,
Where you are meant to return.

Return.

You have filled your belly
with the season’s harvest,
Grown robust on bowls of chile and beans,
Apple muffins spread with honey.
You have split and stacked your kindling,
patched your cloak.
There is nothing left undone.

Drop the distractions, now,
and head home.
The door is open. Go in.
Deeper and deeper inward.

Enter the womb of the world
and take refuge there.

This is not the season of sorrow,
but of gratitude.
The extravagant, fiery beauty of autumn
heralds the coming of the holy quiet.

Be still.
Be wildly, voluptuously quiet.
Embrace your solitude like the child
you never thought you could birth,
Like the lover
you thought had died in the war,
who parts the curtains
of your innermost chamber
in the middle of the night
and slips into bed beside you.”

“The shortening of the daily cycle gives rise to festivals of light around the world. Today is Saint Lucia’s Day, a traditional Swedish festival that combines pagan heritage with Christian legend. Lucia herself has little to do with light and winter; she was a Christian martyr beheaded in the days when Christians faced horrific persecutions [by the Romans]. But because her name is Latin for light, the Vikings who converted to Christianity infused their solstice service with the personage of this beloved saint.
The Scandinavian image of a young woman in a white robe and a wreath of burning candles is a compelling image. It is a day to let everyone’s light shine – and perhaps to wonder how we can bring light and sustenance into each other’s lives more often.”
From Earth Bound: Daily Meditations for All Seasons by Brian Nelson

“Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye… it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.”
Edvard Munch, born on this day in 1863

“We come to know the world as paradise when our hearts and souls are reborn through the arduous and tender task of living rightly with one another and the earth. Generosity, non-violence, and care for one another are the pathways into transformed awareness. Knowing that paradise is here and now is a gift that comes to those who practice the ethics of paradise. This way of living is not Utopian. It does not spring simply from the imagination of a better world but from a profound embrace of this world. It does not begin with knowledge or hope. It begins with love.”
From Saving Paradise by Rita Nakashimi Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”
Emily Dickinson, born on this day in 1830

“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.”
John Milton, born on this day in 1608

“The beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things.”
Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592), philosopher and essayist

“In the ancient Shiva Sutras of India, it is written: “Let the mind descend into the heart.” In the Philocalia, early Christian writings on prayer, it is written: “Let the mind descend into the heart.”
This is the first and last instruction for spiritual practice, for the beginner and the advanced, for the East and the West, the left and the right.
Let your mind descend into your heart. Rest in the goal before the path arises. Become the Light that is born from the womb of divine darkness, and irradiate the world.”
Fred Lamotte

“No enunciation of the Truth will ever be complete, no method of training will ever be suitable for all temperaments, no one can do more than mark out the little plot of infinity which he intends to cultivate, and thrust in the spade, trusting that the soil may eventually be fruitful and free from weeds so far as the bounds he has set himself extend.”

Dion Fortune, born on this day in 1890

Image: Vincent Van Gogh

Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller,

“Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.”

In honour of painter Claude Monet, who died on this day in 1926