Devoted To True Nature

Nature's Vibrant Light, So Exquisite

To create is to pull different threads 

of several things together to birth something new.

Creation is an endless journey of inner self-inquiry, 
outer movement and boundless imagination 
rising from our sacred spaces. 

Creativity is a mosaic, a recipe, a tapestry, 

a breathing changing kaleidoscope
of potent living creation.

We cannot miss any story that we are 

destined to live and experience.

Nature's Creative Gifts

"THE island dreams under the dawn

And great boughs drop tranquillity;

The peahens dance on a smooth lawn,

A parrot sways upon a tree,

Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.

Here we will moor our lonely ship

And wander ever with woven hands,

Murmuring softly lip to lip,

Along the grass, along the sands,

Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:

How we alone of mortals are

Hid under quiet boughs apart,

While our love grows an Indian star,

A meteor of the burning heart,

One with the tide that gleams, 

the wings that gleam

and dart,

The heavy boughs, the burnished dove

That moans and sighs a hundred days:

How when we die our shades will rove,

When eve has hushed the feathered ways,

With vapoury footsole by the water's drowsy blaze."

by William Butler Yeats

Every Day You Play

Every day you play with the light of the universe.

Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.

You are more than this white head that I hold tightly

as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.

Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.

Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?

Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.

The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.

Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.

The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.

The wind. The wind.

I can contend only against the power of men.

The storm whirls dark leaves

and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.

You will answer me to the last cry.

Cling to me as though you were frightened.

Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,

and even your breasts smell of it.

While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies

I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,

my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.

So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,

and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.

A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.

I go so far as to think that you own the universe.

I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,

dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

I want

to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

by Pablo Neruda

Southern Beech Forest

Forests of cascading moss—

trees webbed with a green bewitchment

not of their making.

It’s the woods you imagined for Sleeping Beauty

—lichen pours from the boughs

like a green arrested waterfall.

Here it seems to have always lately rained, the drops

still swimming on the leaf, boles beaded with droplets,

like a water jug.

Below, are the half-aquatic ferns

that thrive on a twilit glow at midday;

the fronds shine like gills

perpetually glibbed with water.

The forest has two weathers, rain and drip-dry.

It ingests sunlight and rain in half-hour doses, mixing them

with odd exudates of planet-skin to build this loam, this roof.

Such thickets Earth draws round her like a shawl

to keep out heat and chill, remnants of

old Gondwanaland beech forests

that carry with them still

the breath of paradise, since

now it seems agreed that Eden must

have been rain forest.

by Mark O'Conner

The Numbers

Radiohead

It holds us like a phantom

The touch is like a breeze

It shines its understanding

See the moon smiling

Open on all channels

Ready to receive

And we're not at the mercy

Of your shimmers or spells

Your shimmers or spells

We are of the earth

To her we do return

The future is inside us

It's not somewhere else

It's not somewhere else

It's not somewhere else

One day at a time

We call upon the people

People have this power

The numbers don't decide

Your system is a lie

The river running dry

The wings of a butterfly

And you may pour us away like soup

Like we're pretty broken flowers

We'll take back what is ours

Take back what is ours

One day at a time

One Moment In Time,
Breathe as Nature, as Nature's Creation,
We are born from this sacred earth
Our Ultimate Light Being.

Divine and Gentle Friend.

Tounka means

innovation, independence, determination, courage, sincerity and activity.

Rising In Sublime Faith, Surrender To A Love Not Knowing

"When Western civilisation set out on its many paths of winning, accomplishment, and conquest, the contemplative mind seemed uninteresting and even counterproductive to our egoic purposes. 

The contemplative mind got in the way of definable goals for progress, science, and development, which were very good and necessary in their own way—but not for soul knowledge. 

We lost almost any notion of paradox, mystery, or the wisdom of unsayability—which are the open-ended qualities that make faith so dynamic, creative, and nonviolent. 

Instead, we insisted on “knowing,” and even certain knowing all the time and every step of the way! 

This is no longer the enlightening path but a rather late and utterly inadequate form of religion, which is probably why so many individuals, especially in the West, now say they are “spiritual but not religious.” I cannot fault them for that, though it sounds like the dualistic mind speaking. 

We must remember that Faith in its maturity is supremely love-centered, not information– or knowledge-centered. 

"The primacy of love allows our knowing to be much humbler and more patient and helps us to recognise that other traditions and other people have much to teach us, and there is also much we can share with them." ~ Richard Rohr 

This stance of honest self-knowledge and deeper interiority, with the head (Scripture), the heart (Experience), and the body (Tradition) operating as one, is helping many to be more integrated and truthful about their own actual experience of God.

Contemplation allows us to see things in their wholeness and thus with respect (re–spect means to see a second time). 

Until Richard recognizes and somehow compensates for his prejudicial way of seeing the moment, all Richard will tend to see is his own emotional life and agenda in every new situation. 

This is the essential letting–go lesson (kenosis) of Contemplation 101, but such self–emptying does not yet feel much like “prayer” to the average person, which is probably why many give up too soon and frankly never truly meet otherness, much less the Other. They just keep meeting themselves over and over again. 

• Only at a deeper level of contemplation do we begin to see the correlation between how we do anything and how we do everything else. 
• We take the moment in front of us much more seriously and respectfully. 
• We catch ourselves out of the corner of our eye, as it were, and our ego games are exposed and diminished. 

Such knowing does not contradict the rational, but it’s much more holistic and inclusive. 

It might be called trans-rational although many think it is pre-rational. 

It goes where the rational mind cannot go, but then comes back to honour the rational, too.

In Living School, we call this “contemplative epistemology” a contemplative theory of how we know what we know. 

Contemplation is really the change that changes 

everything, especially, first of all, the seer. 

Clearing Up, Coast of Sicily

Andreas Achenbach, one of Düsseldorf's most influential painters 

in the mid-19th century, specialised in the "sublime" 

mode of landscape painting, in which man is dwarfed 

by nature's might and power. 

Adapted from Richard Rohr

The Universal Christ: 

How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe 

Earth Sun Day Obsessions

True Nature ~ Inner and Outer

Journey Spirals To The Centre of The Universe

#Dadirri

Wash Away The Worry ~  Soaking With Care

"Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. 

It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. 

Love, therefore, is its own reward." 

Thomas Merton

Nature's Classics 

#LuceatLuxVestra #smartartists #music #yes

Take Me Outside Magical Worlds

Wild wands of tall ferny greens, 

conduct sweet drops, unfold curled tips 

sweet sprinkle rain of a soft fronded rise.

Blue lizard, moss rocks, red backs,

The swing, the Cubby and old backyard dunny

Grapefruit, green grass, footy space.

Calling me, "Now!", calling me quick,

just one more magical moment running a secret garden path

farewell fern playful, frond tip flicks scoring this sated face.

Thank you Mr Spider's Web, Thank you Mrs Tree Fern

Thank you all creatures great and small these magic friends sleep now

as you bide me safely home.

Now softer, now kinder and maybe wiser,

Each tiny pebble, each towering gum, each Friendly Green Frond 

was, still is, This Wonder, 

Full World, 

to me. 

Respect Nature First

Dadirri deeper as mountain water flows

 tall flora finds our shining lakeside, 

Tiona green cathedral prayers for first people

always was, always will Be, home, 

these ancients dreams of vast horizons.

Australian Bushfire Response? Ability?

Researched and Compiled by Kara Eva Schlegl
Additional research and fact checking: Simon Holmes à Court
Special thanks to Dan Ilic, Alex Gabbott, Maria Yanovsky, Ena Markovic, Matt Perrott, James Colley, Scott Ludlam, Tim Minchin, Simon & Katrina Holmes à Court & Dick Smith.

Introduction


I was driving home at 3am, after my team and I finalised the edit of this video, and a government ad came on the radio advising that extreme water restrictions are now in place, due to the severe drought currently afflicting NSW.


I don’t know about you, but I’m furious. Furious that we are governed by people who will instruct us to have shorter showers, and at the same time, will allow Australia’s mining sector to consume over 20% of our freshwater supply every single year.


I’m furious that our government will pour billions of dollars into the mining sector, but refuses to pay even minimum wage to the firefighters who put their lives on the line for us every bushfire season.


In December 2019, Prime Minister Scott Morrison ran a campaign of deflection, telling the Australian people that the unprecedented bushfire crisis raging across the country had nothing to do with his government’s inaction on climate change, saying that emissions reductions in Australia won’t make a difference to the climate.


The truth is, taking action on climate change isn’t limited to emissions reduction. Taking action means heeding the warnings, and investing time, money and influence into preventing the worst from happening, and preparing our country for oncoming disasters.

Our governments didn’t take action on climate change, and now, in the words of NSW RFS Firefighter Darin Sullivan, ‘we’ve gotta deal with it’.


I hope this document, and the video it accompanies, gives us a better understanding of the circumstances that led to the 2019 - 2020 bushfire crisis, and inspires us to help prevent it from happening again.


- Kara

Watts, Merton, Nakho, Wisdom On Love

The desert mystics’ primary quest was for God, for Love;
 everything else was secondary. 

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) helped modern Christianity recover an
 awareness of contemplative practice,
in part inspired by his reading of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. 

Merton wrote: 

“All through the Verba Seniorum [Latin for Words of the Elders] we find a repeated insistence on the primacy of love over everything else in the spiritual life: over knowledge, gnosis, asceticism, contemplation, solitude, prayer. Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions. The more lofty they are, the more dangerous the illusion.” [1]

The Desert Fathers and Mothers focused on these
primary practices in their search for God:

1) leaving, to some extent, the systems of the world;

2) a degree of solitude to break from the maddening crowd; 

3) times of silence to break from the maddening mind; and 

4) “technologies” for controlling the compulsivity of mind and the emotions. 

All of this was for the sake of 
growing a person capable
 of love and community. 

Contemplation became a solid foundation for building 

a civilisation and human community

not just in the wilderness centuries ago but in the world today. 

Contemplative consciousness labels things less easily and 

does not attach itself to one solitary definitive meaning. 

In contemplation, one experiences all things as somehow created 

in the image of God 

and therefore of equal dignity and deserving of respect.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Love is our true destiny. 

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - 

we find it with another.

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, 

order, rhythm and harmony.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth 

plants something in his soul.

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.

When ambition ends, happiness begins.

We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, 

and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.

We are already one. 

But we imagine that we are not. 

And what we have to recover is our original unity. 

What we have to be is what we are.

Water, This Must Be The Place.

Water, This Must Be The Place.

Unable to perceive the shape of you, 

I find you all around me. 

Your presence fills my eyes with your love. 

It humbles my heart, for you are everywhere.

When we do not see or taste or feel the water

We are the flow, We know, we have arrived. 

Welcoming The Darkness.

Nic reminding men about our primal natures. 

The Descent to ground zero, shed all that is not true

Stand tall and firm in our animalistic natures, 

embrace our wild, contain the potency, 

predatory. survival, cellular richness

Shadow work in groups, innate divine power of love 

connects deeply as earth, direct barefoot and naked as born

stripped of pretence and comfort and light.

Does this terror terrify? 

Reclaim and own it consciously, Nic is a lead learner living his truth.

Submit to depths uncertainty of oceans not knowing where you stand

Harness the inner fire, discerningly flame and rise to share a slow heated feast  

Not to scorch or pillage or forcefully take the fruit

But rather tend the soils, deeper still and sow the seed

spread of receptive deeper wells. 

I first worked with Nic in 2012

Lessons Remain from what he graciously shared.   

Surrender, Submission. Choose Your Depth To Dive And Live.

"There is nothing for Her to submit TO until He provides a container of provision (which is multidimensional) around Her. In other words, for ME, it is the Masculine who must always 'submit' first." - Gillian Pothier

I surrender to vast Horizons of Natural Wonder

Deep pools, those stars, eye more awe as we wander.

Open to mystery, no destination, I lead in following

true nature, life, devoted, divine, aligned and kind. 

Stage and State. Is it still all about You? Holy Not Whole? Saintly not Smart?

"Contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber offers a helpful distinction between stages and states. 

Your stage is your outer awareness. 

Your state is your inner aliveness.

 The goal is to be both holy and whole, saintly and wise.

 But your state and stage don’t always coincide; many of us are stronger in one area than another.

You can be a high–level thinker and be quite astute about psychology, theology, history, or philosophy (a high stage), but do it all from a perspective of individualism and arrogance about that very information (a low state)—because it is still all about “you.” 

Conversely, you could be quite unified within and with others, in a high state of loving consciousness, but be poorly informed, lacking in exposure and education to helpful and informative knowledge.

Perhaps you know people who are compassionate and kind yet still reveal prejudicial attitudes. 

They may seem hypocritical but are simply at a high state and a low stage. 

Love will win out in them and goodness will flow through them, even if they don’t have the gift of teaching or of understanding complex or contradictory issues.

 They are holy but not whole, saintly but not “smart.”

This describes many Desert Fathers and Mothers: having high states of union but by today’s standards low levels of cultural, historic, or intellectual exposure to coherent thinking. 

Enjoy them for their state, but do not hate them for their stage! 

Today we have large segments of the population with the opposite problem: high stages of intellectual exposure with very low levels of unitive consciousness—very smart but without awe, humility, or love, which the Desert Fathers and Mothers had in spades!

Many of the desert sayings may sound naïve, simplistic, and even dangerous, but try to receive the simple wisdom of the desert mystics with an open heart and mind in the coming days and let it lead you to authentic joy. 

Perceive and enjoy their state of loving union; don’t dismiss them for living in a pre-rational society. Perhaps holding this tension compassionately for them will help us do the same for people in our own time. "

Centre for Action and Contemplation. 

Richard Rohr

Reference:
[1] See, for example, “States, Stages, and the Three Kinds of Self,” Integral Life (September 16, 2009), https://integrallife.com/states-stages-and-3-kinds-self/.

Life Elixir

"entree of ushered thunder
as lightning bows her encore
ghost sky dances a pane less grey
in the heavy cloud belly pregnant.

The resplendent birth overdue
deep soothing shared in tears of joy

rich life elixir race rivers to sea, 

to seed, to land, to us,
a cycling birth of unchained hearts
in flow, our deepest celebration."

by Tony Searl

#sendherdownhuey

Radiant Intimacy of the Heart

The person who strives after worldly goods and seeks satisfaction from outside the self is working for death because everything in the world is constantly dying and something else is born.
This striving to validate externally becomes comfortably futile as intention hears from a place of lack.
We earn and choose a living to live freely and lightly, not to possess and accumulate. If we focus on this constantly turning wheel, keeping up, comparing, we burden ourselves with stress. We lose our self as we exert externally and allow or spill energy that is ultimately wasted. Discern what is worth your energy, where we are challenged to grow, aligned with symbiotic energies of self contained fullness.
If we leak energy to other's, if we become conditioned to debt, slaves to corporations, beholden to employers, codependent as partners or unhealed from family of origin, we spin away from or are never living our Truth, our core.

We get enmeshed in this external force, we lose our sovereignty to choose our own path and unconsciously rely on the futile game of external appearances and external projects. Unable to float freely in life, to be self sufficient, to be self supported, we drown, we flounder we seek more support to stop us going under. This seeking external validation or desire for more money or steal other's energy results in internal stress and this dis-ease is the price we pay for co-dependency. 

If we choose from a closed mind, a forceful ego, a lost soul that at a deeper unconscious level still believes it lacks, or is not already good enough. 

The unconscious energy of stress also seeks and feeds off this darkness of seeking an external validation of worthiness. We are enough. We are perfectly Ok, exactly as we are. Although a cur may bite, we will not bite back. Learn to accept being content. Relax, surrender and make discerning choices to iterate towards and we end up with more than we know what to do with. We can then share that abundance with others.  

A discerning full heart that is connected to it's own source and free from other's conditioning, influence or expectation grows from within.
It is a full space over flowing and we return to that deep centred well to rest, restore and serve.
We move through life stages as the child dies to the youth and the adolescent to the adult and the adult to wise elder. And so the life spiral of lived experience rises.

When we do not feel the water, we are simply flowing, consciously as the stream, not in the stream, we arrive easily without stress or worry or mindlessness.

This simply is us, who we are at our fundamental self supported and freely floating cores and that interdependence, connection and alignment in the same flowing community stream becomes our daily place in each bare moment of home.

Mystery, Uncertainty, Be Surrendered To Not Knowing

"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. 

There is always more mystery."

Explore The Delta of Venus, death, love, Truth

and other sensual depths of Anais Nin.

Green Gardens Lead By Following

Reality Of The Ancients

"So much talk of the divine feminine these days yet most of what I see is still Eve worship...

The holy mother soft yin receptive nurturing side of Her... 

There is a serious castration of the goddess going on in this perversely patriarchal worship of the gentle side of the feminine... It's like sucking at her generous soothing tit while forgetting the lower half of her body

If you want to worship the goddess and see the feminine rise you've got to get down on your knees and worship the holy savage power between her legs too

The sacred whore, Lilith, dark Goddess. 

The untethered wildness of her holy Night

The raw untamed boundless power that arises in the vessel of her sexual potency

This is the power that made God banish Lilith because Adam couldn't handle the undulation of her hips...kicked out of the garden and replaced by the submissive gentle digestible Eve

The power of woman is so fierce and total that it has been feared as evil

To worship this bitch you have to tread the fine line between sacred and profane, good and evil, madonna and whore, spiritual and sexual

She is not squeaky clean.

She does not come to you in a bubble bath of roses.

Smear your body in dirt if you want to know Her.

She rises from the cunt.

The messy sticky feral juice of power unbounded by duality...

She is the radical force of life itself, moving without agenda or name, 

forsaken by the dredges of polite society.

The feminine is not only the soft forgiving caress of the breast.

She is pure Power.

She is the pulsation of crazy wisdom erupting from the chalice of her sexual core.

She is the tigress.

She is the relentless throb of existence unraveling sacred truth, guided by the fierce instinct of non dual knowing.

A magnetic pussy that dilates in tune with the Real.

She is the descending current, married to the mystery of the divine in density.

She is the bleeding orgasm of agony and ecstasy, and her temple is wrapped in snakes dripping down her thighs.

If you want to see the feminine rise, get down on your knees in the dirt and worship the messy cunt of the one who has been forgotten...."

The healing wisdom of

Maya Luna

Thank you