This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~Rumi

Unconditional
Willing to experience aloneness,
We discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face our fears,
We meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to loss,
We gain the embrace of the universe;
Surrendering into emptiness,
We find fullness without end.
Each condition we flee from pursues us,
Each condition we welcome transforms us
And becomes itself transformed
Into its radiant jewel-like essence.
I bow to the one who has made it so,
Who has crafted this Mysterious Game.
To play, it is purest delight;
To honor its form--true devotion.

~Jennifer Welwood

Everything is Waiting for You
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.
As if life were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions.
To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.
Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus,
crowding out your solo voice.
You must note the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things to come,
the doors have always been there to frighten you and to invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness
and ease into the conversation.
The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink,
the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last.
All the birds and creatures of the world
are unutterably themselves.
Everything is waiting for you.

~David Whyte

We Break to Join
We have hatched
We have cracked our limits
We have stumbled
out to blinding risk.
Each breaking brings us room,
until we press our growing
against the next shell.
And the final shell we break
will open us to death.
But these current crackings
come so often,
we barely rest and stretch
and let ourselves be a little,
before we come aware
of a constriction.
New walls compress
against our spreading arms,
our swelling needs.
We are cramped
by a smallness,
by a law, by a custom.
We are live files
grinding against confinement.
Yet shell by shell we break
past a culture that stunts.
By raw will
of woman towards creation,
I move. And you.
We use even the shards.
We bury them
to fertilize our earth again.
Each of us,
cracking the madness
the drastic madness that says
we are divided.
We break to join!
~Susan Silvermarie

Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall
while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish
and then return to the source.

 Returning to the source is stillness,
which is the way of nature.
 
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy
leads to disaster.
Knowing constancy,
the mind is open.
With an open mind,
you will be openhearted.
Being openhearted,
you will act royally.
 
~Lao Tsu

Working Together
We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
the intangible air

traveled at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self,
by forming it well

to the great
intangibles about us.

~David Whyte

Break
Rest, now.
Let the weight you run from every day
now draw you down.
Later there will be time to tend
to everything left undone.
Now, rest.
Fall
into your own bones
lying horizontal on this ground.
Come
into your dark corners.
Come into this
original nakedness
under all the layers.
Come where all your losses
split
you
open.
Don’t rise,
yet —
Rest.
Be drawn deeper down
into the salt tide of tears.
Let grief wash you,
then drown you
beyond the name
you first were given,
when you reached to touch
your own mother’s face for the very first time,
and she smiled her light down into you.
Now reach those same fingers
for the face of infinity —
so that, opening your eyes
you will know
the one dreaming you
is pleased with you,
that everything seen
is your self,
and that now is the time
to rise wholehearted into the work
aching to be animated
by precisely you.

~Brook McNamara