“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

From The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, born on this day in 1924

A Happy Lammas / Lughnasadh to you!

“This is the beginning of the harvest time when the sun and the rains swell the seeds and ripen the fruits. Misty mornings and colder nights remind us that we have passed the longest day, and the cycle of the year is turning, as we dance on the edge between high summer and the edge of autumn…

It is a time when we can feel most alive, full of hope, rich with connection, friendships and community. But we can also feel lonely and vulnerable. This is a call to be honest and real about our feelings and not to stay isolated by them.

Sharing our feelings helps others to share theirs. It is a gift we give each other. Expressing our feelings helps us to flow and to see what we want to change and what we still need to work with. They are the new seeds of our future selves forming.

Traditionally Lammas is a celebration of the great gathering in of the grain harvest, stored throughout the winter to keep us in bread and grain products. They are also the seeds that will be sown in the spring and the seeds that will bring next year’s harvest…

Lammas encourages our generosity of spirit and reminds us to give thanks for all the abundance in our lives. The more we give from our hearts, the more returns to us – as all is connected and flowing parts of the whole.”

From Letting in the Wild Edges by Glennie Kindred

“The shapes and colours of flowers and fruit, the curling of a wave or a tendril, the song of birds, the graceful movements of living creatures, the regularity of a crystal or a snowflake – all these and many more things are part of the beauty of the world. It is this which enables us to face up to the ugliness and pain of the world, which also is a continuing feature of it. All things grow misshapen, including human lives. There is grace, and there is also distortion; there is sweetness and bitterness; there is wonderful creativeness and there is senseless destruction. And so we pray that we may learn to live in such a world, and with such a human nature. We are grateful for all the help and inspiration we receive from the frequent beauty of the world, and the frequent grace in human lives.”

Harry Lismer Short (1906 – 1975), Unitarian minister, quoted in Fragments for Holiness for Daily Reflection

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF FRIENDSHIP

“Oh, the comfort—the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”

Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

“Precisely what does it mean to experience oneself as a human being? In the first place, it means that the individual must have a sense of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family or the organized kinship that binds him ethnically or racially or nationally. He has to feel that he belongs to his total environment. He has a sense of being an essential part of the structural relationship that exists between him and all other men and between him, all other men, and the total external environment. As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives, and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. In other words, he seems himself as a part of a continuing breathing, living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world.”

Howard Thurman (1899 – 1981)

“All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. . . . Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.”

Beatrix Potter, Unitarian writer, born on this day in 1866

“Enlightenment is to stay as you are. Stay as you are without such labels as “I am enlightened”, “I am a free man”, “I am a sage”, “I am a monk”, or “I am a saint”.
Simply, don’t give yourself any label.
When you get rid of all labels, that which remains is called “freedom” or “enlightenment”.
When you give yourself a label you become “someone”.
When you have removed all “becomings” and return to conscious being, this is enlightenment.
But the word “enlightenment” is also just a concept.
In being there is no darkness at all.
Only when there is darkness do you need a candle.
But here, in being, there is no darkness, so there is no need for any candle to bring forth any light. Only when you become “someone” do you need a light.”

Papaji (1910 – 1997)

“To our indigenous ancestors, and to the many aboriginal peoples who still hold fast to their oral traditions, language is less a human possession than it is a property of the animate earth itself, an expressive, telluric power in which we, along with the coyotes and the crickets, all participate. Each creature enacts this expressive magic in its own manner, the honeybee with its waggle dance no less than a bellicose, harrumphing sea lion.
Nor is this power restricted solely to animals. The whispered hush of the uncut grasses at dawn, the plaintive moan of trunks rubbing against one another in the deep woods, or the laughter of birch leaves as the wind gusts through their branches all bear a thicket of many-layered meanings for those who listen carefully. In the Pacific Northwest I met a man who had schooled himself in the speech of needled evergreens; on a breezy day you could drive him, blindfolded, to any patch of coastal forest and place him, still blind, beneath a particular tree — after a few moments he would tell you, by listening, just what species of pine or spruce or fir stood above him (whether he stood beneath a Douglas fir or a grand fir, a Sitka spruce or a western red cedar). His ears were attuned, he said, to the different dialects of the trees.”

From Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram

“I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
I have tried this experiment a thousand times and I have never been disappointed. The more I look at a thing, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I want to see. It is like peeling an onion. There is always another layer, and another, and another. And each layer is more beautiful than the last.
This is the way I look at the world. I don’t see it as a collection of objects, but as a vast and mysterious organism. I see the beauty in the smallest things, and I find wonder in the most ordinary events. I am always looking for the hidden meaning, the secret message. I am always trying to understand the mystery of life.
I know that I will never understand everything, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. I am content to live in the mystery, to be surrounded by the unknown. I am content to be a seeker, a pilgrim, a traveller on the road to nowhere.”

Henry Miller (1891 – 1980)

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.”

Amelia Earhart, aviator, born on this day in 1897