spirit

Some people today are wandering generalities instead of meaningful specifics because they have failed to discover and mine the wealth of potentials in them.

. . as A martial arts teacher, we should never forget the first time we stepped onto the Dojo ground, remembering this, we will be better equipped to teach the next generation of Karate practitioners

Catastrophe alone sparks man__ salvation. I don__ mean in the religious sense, although I guess it is appropriate there, too, because believers agree that salvation comes only after death. It is part of the human near-tragedy that we learn more from loss than from gain. Gain binds us until we stumble and fall into that black pit then we find the spirit of understanding and truth. And if we fall far enough and still persist, we find our salvation.

The soul, in its loneliness, hopes only for "salvation." And yet what is the burden of the Bible if not a sense of the mutuality of influence, rising out of an essential unity, among soul and body and community and world? These are all the works of God, and it is therefore the work of virtue to make or restore harmony among them. The world is certainly thought of as a place of spiritual trial, but it is also the confluence of soul and body, word and flesh, where thoughts must become deeds, where goodness must be enacted. This is the great meeting place, the narrow passage where spirit and flesh, word and world, pass into each other. The Bible's aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction. It says that they cannot be divided; that their mutuality, their unity, is inescapable; that they are not reconciled in division, but in harmony. What else can be meant by the resurrection of the body? The body should be "filled with light," perfected in understanding. And so everywhere there is the sense of consequence, fear and desire, grief and joy. What is desirable is repeatedly defined in the tensions of the sense of consequence.

Faith is the muscle of the spirit. It is strengthened through study, prayer, and meditation. As exercise builds muscle and our bodies become strong; study, prayer, and meditation builds faith and our spirits become strong.

But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I__ with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we__e taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it__ too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn__ these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane?All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he__ loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon__ so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living__ so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love__ deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.

I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn__ know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine, but my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space, and walked without hesitating to the altar I hadn__ consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why I was there. Because the black current the masseuse had touched wanted, needed, to keep flowing. I__ needed to know I could go on, but I__ also been needing to collapse. Which is what I did, some timeless tear span of minutes sitting on the naked gray stone. A woman gave me the kind of paper napkins you get with an ice cream cone. It seemed to me the most genuine of gifts, made to a stranger: the recognition of how grief moves in the body, leaving us unable to breathe, helpless, except for each other.

Solace of Silencesurreal synapsesof a melancholy dronea dream per chanceshe dared not be alone...

When we create an environment where our spirit is in sync with the Divine Spirit, then we should be on the lookout for good, positive, helpful thoughts and ideas from a source beyond ourselves. p23.

Don__ feed your body and keep your spirit starving. Butter bread for your body and living bread for your spirit. Read the Bible every day and keep your spirit away from hunger.

Just because the ones we love die (or fall out of our lives or disappear from the spinning of our spheres) does not mean we love them any less or erase them from the deeply etched lines of the maps we have traveled.We find ways to keep them alive in spirit, with the brutal knowing that they are gone in body.We can remember; we can feel & this can all be grief & it can all be love, too.

May Saviour set us free from every evil spirit.

Ivanov: With a heavy head, with a slothful spirit, exhausted, overstretched, broken, without faith, without love, without a goal, I roam like a shadow among men and I don't know who I am, why I'm alive, what I want. And I now think that love is nonsense, that embraces are cloying, that there's no sense in work, that song and passionate speeches are vulgar and outmoded. And everywhere I take with me depression, chill boredom, dissatisfaction, revulsion from life... I am destroyed, irretrievably!

You must want to change. It sounds simple, but it__ obviously not. If things were easy, then something would be wrong. You must make a firm decision that this is what you want. If you want to change, if you want to free yourself from a depressed, mediocre mindset, then you must make a conscious decision to do something about it, and stick to it. If you don__ want to change, nothing will help you. Years of endless work will be lost on you unless you internalize your strength and push forward. It is how hard you push in times of difficulty that will prove your strength.

Life is like a sandwich!Birth as one slice,and death as the other.What you put in-between the slices is up to you.Is your sandwich tasty or sour?Allan Rufus.org

There are many goals but one path - the path of compassion.

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

...you can be angry and silent, but it's no use - there's no distance in the spirit - besides, my words touch you more softly than my hands...