Ruah Bull - Spiritual Director

  What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from Ourselves?

Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you, as fish out of water hear the waves, or a hunting falcon hears the drum's 'come back'. This turning to what you dearly love saves you.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life: A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course, A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart that beats So wild, so deep in us - to know Whence our lives come and where they go.  

The breezes at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep! You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep! People are moving back and forth across the door sill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep!

Look at the birds. Even flying is born out of nothing. The first sky is inside you, friend, open at either end of day. The work of wings was always freedom, fastening one heart to every falling thing.

On a branch floating downriver, a cricket singing.

One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily, And loving be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight, And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted, Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers, And work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying, And play will be casual and quiet as a seagull settling, And the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder or care or take notice, And people will smile without reason, even in winter, even in the rain.

But the silence in the mind is when we live best, within listening distance of the silence we call God. This is the deep calling to deep of the psalm - writer, the bottomless ocean we launch the armada of our thoughts on, never arriving. It is a presence, then, whose margins are our margins, that calls us out over our fathoms. What to do but draw a little nearer to such ubiquity by remaining still?

Have compassion on everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What seems conceit, bad manners or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

I would love to live Like a river flows, Carried by the surprise Of its' own unfolding.

Best of any song is bird song in the quiet, but first you have the quiet.

The leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is God I agree with the leaves

I know this happiness is provisional: the looming presences - great suffering, great fear - withdrawing only into peripheral vision: but ineluctable this shimmering of wind in the blue leaves: this flood of stillness widening the lake of sky: This need to dance, This need to kneel: This mystery

O snail, Climb Mount Fuji, But slowly, slowly

If you open your eyes, night opens doors of musk, the secret kingdom of water opens flowing from the center of the night. And if you close your eyes, a river fills you from within flows forward, darkens you! Night brings its' wetness to the beaches of your soul.

In the long journey out of the self, There are many detours, washed- out interrupted raw places Where the shale slides dangerously And the back wheels hang almost over the edge At the sudden veering, the moment of turning. Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones. The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons, Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow valley. Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.      ---Or the path narrowing, Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones, Through the swamp alive with quicksand, The way blocked at last by a fallen fir tree, The thickets darkening, The ravines ugly.