Dear Ma HuLliLi,

A house mouse was wrecking a bit of devastation so I set a live trap. It fell for the bait and is trapped by this morning. Mice come back in if simply let outside; I need to take it farther away than my neighborhood or the next.

My plan is to meditate but I don’t want it to have to wait that long for freedom. So early off together we go, heading for the park where I set it free in a place filled with bark and other bits, and pecans dropped from nearby trees.

There are dry grasses here for cover and seed pods waiting to open up to Spring, and rushes rustling near the pond. It’s a fine place for mouses. And as for my musings, what better place? So after little mouse scurried away I take my time there on the rock in the sun.

I listen. One of my favorite forms of meditation is eyes-closed listening… listening close, listening far, listening in between… it always leads to listening within.

Near, I hear rustling in the leaves at my feet. Expanding that, I hear the birds in the trees and wind in the branches. A ways away, there are friendly voices. And high above there’s a hawk calling in flight.

Listening far, there is traffic, away in the distance. It sounds almost like rushing water from here. And farther still, from time to time, a faint honk or two. Farther than that and it is quiet. Quiet. I listen to the far silence and soon I fall inside out.

Article Highlights:

• Hold your dream like a puppy
• Be a dream magnet
• Awakened dreaming

Dear Day Dreamer,

I just spoke with a friend who related that in her 4th grade class recently she and her co-teacher read the Langston Hughes poem Hold Fast to Dreams.

Hold fast to dreams/ For if dreams die/ Life is a broken-winged bird/ That cannot Fly/ Hold fast to dreams/ For when dreams go/ Life is a barren field/ Frozen with snow.

After reading the poem they had discussion about having a dream, and the children wrote poems about it. During the discussion, the other teacher asked the children what they thought it meant to hold fast to their dream.

My friend shared a few of the answers given. They were wonderful, of course. This led me to prompt my friends with younger children to ask their children the same question. Their answers contain so much wisdom for us grownups. Here they are for your own reflection and enjoyment.

What does it mean to hold fast to your dream?

• Spend time really imagining it.
• Hold on to it like a puppy.
• Feel the electricity of it.
• Enjoy your dream, don’t worry about it.
• Take your dream seriously, ‘cuz it matters to you.
• Learn what is real about your dream.
• Speak your dream out loud because words make dreams real.
• Pin your dream up in your head and look at it a lot.
• Don’t be afraid you won’t get it, because you will.
• Give your dream a big hug.
• If your dream wants you to work for it don’t be too afraid to.
• Don’t forget you dreamed it.
• Be like a magnet that sucks dreams to it.
• Dream it real.

Young children are certainly our experts on making daydreams a daily reality. It’s a good moment in time for us to reflect on how children do this so much more simply and effectively than we do.

The process of creating the world we want is actually the high Art of Dreaming – what I call Awakened Dreaming – and your inner kid is chomping to get on with it! Dream it real, fellow dreamer, dream it real.

See you in the DreamTime, dear Awakened Dreamer.

Warmest hugs,
~Mayet

Article Highlights:

• A spiritual awakening
• When talk is just noise
• Getting to know you

Hello Deep Listener,

When I turned 14, my Aunt Erma presented me with the only gift she ever gave me. It was a book called The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran.

“I think in this book you’ll discover a spiritual language that suits you much better than all that Mormon jargon you get so much of,” she said in her terse New Englander manner.

I didn’t know what to make of her statement but the book’s title and cover felt compelling to me. Mormonism has a tradition and belief in Prophets and Prophecy, and the cover drawing seemed to depict an old-time prophet. Who, I wondered?

Once I began it, I read through the night; such a hunger and longing for truth stirred within me as I turned the pages. The book sparked a spiritual awakening, though I didn’t know that phrase at the time. It was so meaningful that I still carry a miniaturized version of the book with me on my travels.

Recently I was reminded of a passage in which The Prophet (the factionalized character of the author) answers a question about speaking/talking. He says,

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.

The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape. And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.

And there are those who have the truth within them, they tell it not in words.

In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.”

~ The Prophet, Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)

I love this passage, it speaks strongly to my own nature. A quieter teenager and young adult, I struggled with the amount of talk, talk, talking that seemed part of adult life: small-talk, putting-yourself-forward talk, explaining-yourself-to-others-talk, tooting-your-own-horn-talk, gossipy-talk, friends-talk, negotiating-talk, flirting-and-romancing-talk, filling-space-talk, getting-to-know-you-talk. So much talky talk! It always seemed noisy, interruptive, undesirable. It was incredibly difficult for me to do, and I’m often still awkward in, or fatigued by, small talk.

Because of this near aversion for what seemed to me an excess of noise, my own ability to communicate is hard won, as I’ve mentioned to you before. I had to practice, to require myself to move out of my comfort zone. I had to study, and sweat fearfully and acquire skills.

In the end, I made peace with the need for sharing words, while still preferring them to be more meaningful and useful than not. Eventually, however, I gained some skill and even a certain enjoyment for some forms, such as writing or quiet, heartfelt and more intimate verbal sharing.

I enjoy adding a musicality and cadence and flow to talking. I play with forms of speaking and writing that convey more of a sense of silence and spaciousness and peace. The Buddhists understand, admire and encourage this style of writing. For my own writing, I have drawn from their ideas, as well as those of the great mystics and the spiritual poets who imbue words with presence and space. These are all forms of writing, speaking, talking, and words that I enjoy.

When I began to be in contact with many indigenous peoples around the world, imagine my happiness when I discovered they use so many fewer words than we generally do. In fact in some tribes, upon meeting for the first time, people sit in silence for a while before any words or questions are exchanged. For them the best way to get to know someone is to sense them first. I couldn’t agree more!

I quite happily go for days without speaking. If we spent more than a few days together, after the first flurry of excited words shared, you might fidget or feel dismay or even discomfort because of the long lapses into silence that inevitably seem to engulf me.

It might not feel like relating to you. You might wonder what I was thinking or feeling, was I ok? Was I mad at you? No, I’m just quiet, deeply content sharing time and space beyond words. My friend Gloria Steinem once said to me, “You are the quietest person I’ve ever met, but you are quiet in a way that makes me feel peaceful.” I was glad she understood. (more…)