Below are some of the poems and quotes Carla shared in her 4/5/21 Dharma talk called, “Homecoming.”
Each of us spins repeatedly from blindness to radiance,
from dividedness to wholeness,
and it is our impulse to stay in touch with all that is alive
that keeps us from staying lost.
It is the impulse to be intimate.
To live with things
and not in front of them,
to no longer watch,
but to realize that we are part of everything we see –
this is the love
that keeps moving us back into wholeness
when we are divided.
To love by admitting our connection to everything
is how we stay well.
Allowing the current of another’s inwardness
to connect with our own
is the beginning of both
intimacy and enlightenment.
~~Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner — what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Great Ancestor Ma of China said to his students that “for countless aeons not a single being has fallen out of the deep meditation of the universe.”
“For many of us, there’s something pushing us and something pulling us toward homecoming. We’re pushed by our own pain and the pain we see in the world around us; we’re pulled by intimations of something larger and truer than our ordinary self-oriented ways of experiencing life.”
– Zen Teacher Joan Sutherland Roshi
“We are no longer beleaguered exiles but people who can find home even in difficult times, people who are aware of the unlikely presence of awakening even in difficult moments, people who are willing to feel our way in the dark to help bring it forth.”
– Zen teacher Joan Sutherland Roshi
We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
– T. S. Elliot, Four Quartets
“Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.”
– Dogen Zenji
Recommended book:
The Wild Edge of Sorrow
by Francis Weller