Introflection

\ ˈin-trō flek-shən

Simply a place to be with a contemplative practice

The garden of writings here is called Pilgrim’s Ink
 
Soundscapes of rain, birdsong and such are provided, as you please

Scroll below to begin, and please feel free to leave a note

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Pilgrim's Ink

Born a decade ago; always evolving.

The Pilgrim Part

Contemplating writings of saints and sages, prophets and poets.
Selected authors are from many creeds, cultures and religions.

THE INK PART

Writings from 15 books each day are organized as a page. Transcribe even a few excerpts onto paper, frequently perhaps. The consciousness of many through your hand to paper.

Pilgrim's Ink

The practice of Pilgrim’s Ink is personal.
Settle with a candle in a quiet place.
One can simply read and reflect on a page of writings
or,
one can transcribe by hand to paper
Excerpts are a good start,
but writing out an entire page is suggested.
Often, if so inclined.
Perhaps early mornings
to access a wellspring for the day.

Click the Play Chime button,
sit tall and take a deep cleansing breath...
holding the breath until the chime is gone
then release everything
to open an inmost portal.
Let the ink flow.

“Human Being is more verb than noun.” 
- Fr. Renee Iturbe
Spirituality may be ephemeral, gauzy and shapeless in a breeze, yet if we are contemplative…
How does one believe in mysteries?

The oak asked the almond tree: “Tell me about God.”

And the almond tree blossomed.

Just

Breathe

Start Reading

Le point vierge – “at the center of our being a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point of spark…” - Thomas Merton
PAGE
1

We need a great deal of courage to challenge our own beliefs.

- Miguel Ruiz

-
- Miguel Ruiz

We're very much in the position of a color blind man in a beautiful flower garden.

-Emmet Fox

-
-Emmet Fox

The oak asked the almond tree: “Tell me about God.”

And the almond tree blossomed.

-
Nikos Kazantzakis

If you train in awakening compassion only some of the time, it will slow down the process of giving birth to certainty.

Wholeheartedly train in keeping your heart and mind open to everyone.

-

What to me made of sea and silk, of obstruction, of the porous and eroding? What of an indisposed Atlantic coast, left with nothing, nothing but names, natively engraved, though permanence has no favor here among the drifts?

I have taken a tally of fingers in their testing the wind, felt coercion as a passerby, to move, to follow, to heed, yet the bottoms of my feet are rough from this directionless roaming.

I have whispered breathy sonnets in smoke-filled exhalation of wild plumes, risen with rapid nature of currents, to see, to speak, to hope yet even still caol is not of my makeup, to shrivel just to be desired, to be fuel to be consumed. What to be made of fire and ember? Of discord? Of what is left dry? I will not be left to burn.

-
Sarah Maria

Sweet Christ discover diamonds and sapphires in my verse

While I burn the sap of my pine house

For the praise of the ocean sun

My worship is a blue sky and en thousand crickets in the deep wet hay of the field

My vow is the silence under their song.

Their inscape is their sanctity.

It is the imprint of His wisdom and His reality in them.

The special clumsy beauty of this particular colt on this day in this field under these clouds is a holiness consecrated to God by His own creative wisdom, and it declares the Glory of God.

The pale dogwood outside this window are saints.

The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of the road are saints, looking up into the face of God.

The lakes hidden among the hills are saintes, and the sea too is a saint who praises God, without interruption, in her majestic dance.

The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God’s saints.

There is no other like him.

He is alone in his own character; nothing in the world ever did or ever will imitate God in quite the same way. That is his sanctity.

But what about you? What about me?

-
Thomas Merton

Spirituality may be ephemeral, gauzy and shapeless in a breeze, yet if we are contemplative…

-

“Human Being is more verb than noun.”

-
Renee Iturbe
Page 1


What’s to be made of sea and silt, and of obstruction of the porous and eroding? 
What of an indisposed Atlantic coast, left with nothing, nothing but names natively engraved though permanence has no favor here among the drifts? 
I have taken a tally of fingers in their testing the wind, 
felt coercion as a passerby, to move, to follow, to heed, 
yet the bottoms of my feet are rough from this directionless roaming. 
I have whispered breathy sonnets in smoke-filled exhortations of wild plumes, 
risen with rapid nature of currents, to seek, speak, to hope
yet even still coal is not of my makeup to shrivel just to be desired,
to be fuel, to be consumed. What’s to be made of fire and ember?
of discord?
of what is left dry?
I will not be left to burn.

- Sarah Maria


Sweet Christ discovers diamonds and sapphire in my verse
While I burn the sap of my pine house
For the praise of the ocean sun.
My worship is a blue sky and ten thousand crickets in the deep wet hay of the field
My voice is the silence under their song
The inscape is the sanctity. 
It is the imprint of His wisdom and His reality in them.
The special clumsy beauty of this particular colt on this day in this field under these clouds is a holiness consecrated to God by His own creative wisdom, and it declares the glory of God. 
The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. 
The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of the road are saints, looking up into the face of God, without interruption in her majestic dance.
The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God’s saints. There is no other like him. He is alone in his own character; nothing in the world ever did or ever will imitate God in quite the same way. 
That is his sanctity.
But what about you? What about me?

- Thomas Merton


Jesus tells us to contemplate the flowers and learn from them how to live. 

So when you are alert and contemplate a flower, crystal or bird without naming it mentally, it becomes a window for you into the formless. There is an inner opening, however light, into the realm of the spirit. 

- Eckart Tolle


How can you say, I have kept the law and the prophets, when it is written in the law: You shall love your neighbor as yourself? And look, many sons of Abraham, your brothers, are clothed in filth and dying of hunger, while your house is full of good things, none of which goes to them. 

- Jesus

Behold the orb that shines with the rays of the sun, which the cross of salvation spreads from its height, embracing the earth, the sea, the winds and the sky. 

- Esther deWaal

One look at plum blossoms opened Reiun’s eyes
old Tan recites poems 
is often in his cups.
Want meaningless Zen?
Just look - at anything!

- Old Shoju


You must be prepared to endure the hardships involved in a genuine spiritual pursuit and be determined to sustain your effort and will.
The key to a successful practice is to never lose your determination. 

- Dalai Lama


The essence of yoga is union or becoming one with the universe -”unified consciousness comes with the cessation of thoughts.” Quieting the mind allows the natural depth of the spirit to manifest.
The reality of oneness is greater than what is available to you through your own senses and thoughts. 

- Ram Dass


Do other notice if you are absent? Do they miss your warmth, you presence? 
We should radiate the presence of Christ by our compassion; 
Let us be his presence to others. 

- Mother Teresa

Page 2

Plucked

You give me wings, just to pluck each feather
from my back and watch me crash
back to earth.

- Topher Kirby


Prayer belong less to time that to eternity.
How long we wait, with minds quiet as time, like sentries on a tower. 
How long we watch, by night, like the astronomers.
Heaven, when will we hear you sing, arising from our grassy hill 
And say: “The dark is done
A Day laughs like a Bridegroom in his tent
In his tent, the lovely sun
His tent the sun
His tent the smiling sky!”
How long will we wait with minds as dim as ponds
While stars swim slowly homeward in the water of our west!
Heaven, when will we hear you sing? 
How long we listened to the silence of our vineyards
And heard no bird stir in the rising barley
The stars go home behind the shaggy trees.
Our minds are as grey as rivers.
O earth, when will you wake in the green wheat
And all our cedars sing:
“Bright land, lift up your leafy gates! 
You abbey steeple, sing with bells!
For look, our Sun rejoices like a dancer on the rim of our hills.”
In the blue west the moon is uttered like the word: “Farewell.” 

- Thomas Merton


“I think, therefore I am.”

- Descartes


If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn’t even know you are thinking.
You would be like a dreamer who doesn’t know he is dreaming.

- Eckart Tolle


Go into the streets and alleys and bring back the destitute, the crippled, the blind, and the lame to our banquet. There will be no merchants in my father’s palace. 

- Jesus


The little sun gowing in the grass is looking up toward the great sun in the sky;
the great is reflected in the small, and the small holds within itself the reflection of the great.
A million suns lie scattered at our feet and we trample them heedlessly until we start to see. 

- Esther deWaal


Now You See It

What you don’t see helps you see what you do see:
The keyhole sharpens the thrill in your brain
Even if there is no one in the room
Shadows wafting across the white sheets
As song drifts in the window
Her voice so pure you can see the face it rises from
For what you see helps you see what you don’t see.

- Ron Padgett


If we can satisfy people at a heart level, peace will ensue.

- Dalai Lama


“If you meditate on your ideal, you will acquire its nature.
If you think of God day and night, you will acquire the nature of God.”

- Sri Ramakrishna 


If you do your work with joy, you can bring many souls to God. 
Joy is a prayer, a sign of our generosity, evident in our eyes, our faces, our actions. 

- Mother Teresa


Birdwings

Your grief for what you have lost lifts a mirror up to where you are bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here is the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding
The two as beautifully balanced as birdwings.

- Rumi


The Maternal Tenderness of God

With Mary, the God-Child learned to listen to the yearning, the anguish, the joys and hopes of the people of the promise.

- Pope Francis


The Beatitudes

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Poor in spirit” means to have emptied yourself of all desire to exercise personal self-will and to have renounced all preconceived notions in the wholehearted search for God. It means to be willing to jettison anything and everything that can stand in the way of your finding God. 

- Emmet Fox


Page 3

What secret and intrepid Visitor softly springs the lock of Time?
Our souls rise up from our earth Like Jacob waking from his dream and exclaiming: “Truly God is in this place and I knew it not!”
God becomes the only reality, in whom all other reality takes its proper place - and falls into insignificance. 

- Thomas Merton

When a house is built, an ugly screen and iron bars are put on the windows to protect what is inside from thieves.
Have you ever thought how just the sight of those bars, that screen, makes us uneasy and steals some of our peace and happiness?

- Dali Lama

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
There is really no need for man to have trouble, because if he will only seek God first, the trouble need never come. 

- Emmet Fox


Lighthouse

Its vision sweeps its one path like an aged monk raking a garden
His question
long ago answered or moved on.
Far off, night-grazing horses,
breath scented with oat grass and fennel
Step through it, disappear.
Step through it, disappear.

- Jane Hirshfield


The field where the April cuckoo sang has become the milky way:
The firmament turned upside down.
Millions of suns in the heavens are placed beneath my feet,
to gild the grass of this grey earth…
Stars like seraphim
in the splendid azure sky.
Yesterday I saw a daisy.

- Esther deWaal


Whoever among you becomes a child will recognize our Father’s kingdom.

- Jesus

The mind is maya. The veil of delusion.

- Ramona

Wherever you go, whatever you do, you will encounter dukkha, misery.

- Buddha

“Sin” means to miss the mark, to miss the point of human existence.

- Christian

You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. 

- Eckart Tolle

Mary shows us with her Motherhood that humility and tenderness are not virtues of the weak but of the strong.

- Pope Francis

Carnivore

You feasted on my carrion -
A meal perfectly prepared for a savage beast
With an appetite only my broken soul could satisfy.

- Allison Theresa


When we neglect prayer, evil can penetrate our hearts. 

- Mother Teresa


A hide is soaked in tanning liquor and becomes leather.
If the tanner did not rub in the acid, the hide would get foul-smelling and rotten.
The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross.
Work on it with manual discipline, and the bitter tanning acid of grief,
and you’ll become lovely and strong.
Very strong.

- Rumi


Maya - We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.

- Ram Dass


Page 4

Sweet Christ, discover diamonds
And sapphires in my verse
While I burn sap of my pine house
For the praise of the ocean sun.

Sink from your shallows, soul, into eternity.
We touch the rays we cannot see.
We feel the light that seems to sing.

- Thomas Merton

Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.
The spiritual meaning of this text is the secret of Dominion; literally the Key of Life.

-The Philosopher's stone of The Alchemist that turns the base metal of limitations and trouble into the “gold” of harmony; true comfort.

-All causation is mental- The manifestation of your mental states. The “Earth” is the whole of your outer experience. To inherit the earth is to have dominion over that experience.

Meek.: open mindedness, faith in God, and understanding that the will of God is joyous, interesting, and vital, and much better than anything we can think for ourselves.

-Emmet Fox

Voids in Form
When, just as they are, white dewdrops gather
On scarlet Maple leaves
regard the scarlet beads!

-Sojun

“A person is what his shraddha is”; that which is placed in the heart; beliefs we hold so deeply that we never think to question them. It is our very substance.

“We live in what we love”

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought; We are molded by our thoughts.”

“Secretly nature seeks and hunts and tries to ferret out the track in which God may be found.”

- Meister Eckhart

There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing it’s springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid, and doesn't move from the outside to the inside through the conduits of plumbing - learning.

The second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.

- Rumi

In the depths of my being, you are my God,
At the rising of the Sun, I seek your face.
My heart thirsts for you, my flesh longs for you,
in a barren and dry land where no water is.
My search for you in unexpected places
At the edge of the known, in the language of dreams
There may I look long and lovingly.
There may I listen for the word beyond words,
There may I wait for a glimpse of your glory.

- Psalm 63.

Let anyone who has power renounce it.

- Jesus

On All Saints Day we pray to those who are where they want to go.
On All Saints Day, we pray for those still suffering in purgatory and far from God.

- Mother Teresa.

Each and every one of us
A beast imprisoned inside
The tragedy of man happens when
He unleashes the Beast
And imprisons the man

- Daniel Saint


Page 5

Life: the upward thrust of evolution.

The Gita is a book of choices: The downward pull of our evolutionary past.

The struggle is between two halves of human nature, and life offers no fiercer battle than this war within; We have no choice about the fighting, It is built into human nature.

We shape ourselves in our world by what we believe and think and act on whether for good or for ill.

- Bhagavad Gita

“Study of Two Pears”

The shadows of the pears
Are blobs in the green cloth
The pears are not seen as the observer wills

- Wallace Stevens

In times we’re strong, we prepare for when we are weak.

- anonymous

“Oh would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others do?

- Robert Burns

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled
Right thinking on all subjects, in every department of life.
Outer things are but consequences of what goes on in the Secret Place.
As within, so without.
No good thing is out of your reach, here and now.
We should constantly pray for wisdom and guidance and for the living action of the Holy Spirit upon us.

- Emmet Fox

Praise Christ, all you living creatures. For him, you and I were created. With every breath we love him. Psalms fulfill your dim, unconscious song, O brothers in this wood.

- Thomas Merton

Don't tell me you love the rain
when you don't stay to watch her dry
after she's fallen for you.

- Lauren Eden

For the month of the Holy Souls and in union with their silence, let us offer to God many acts of silence.

- Mother Teresa

I have lit a fire on earth and shall watch over it until it blazes.
Whoever is near me is near the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the Kingdom of our Father.

-Jesus

I am here in this solitude before you, and I am Glad because you see me here.
For it is here, I think, that you want to see me and I'm seen by you.
My being here is a response you have asked of me, to something I have not clearly heard. But I have responded... you have called me here to be repeatedly born in the spirit. As your child. Repeatedly burn in light, in unknowing, in faith, in awareness, ingratitude, in poverty, in presence, and in praise.

- Thomas Merton

“They love him” “He loves them”

Those joining loves are both qualities of God. Fear is not.

-Rumi

As children we didn't have the opportunity to choose our beliefs, but we agreed with what was passed on to us via other humans.

-Miguel Ruiz


Mothers are the most powerful antidote against our individualistic and selfish tendencies. Because mothers, even at the worst of times, know how to bear witness to tenderness, unconditional dedication, the power of hope.

- Pope Francis