Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon

Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon in long, slow motion movements of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is the earth -- home.

Coming home to one's Self

Home is a context that includes values, emotions, thoughts, special persons. Coming home to one’s Self in developed spirituality means something similar: a returning to renewed familiarity with oneness, to conscious union with a love from everyone and everything. Being consciously in touch with the One is to be immediately in touch with all things. This touch is not academic or abstract. It’s a light in the mind, but also a feeling in the heart. It’s an experience of the Spirit of all that is.

When one is with God, there is nowhere else to go

God is love. God is unspeakable inner joy and bliss. To be with God is to be without needs, for all is fullness and union. When one is with God, there is nowhere else to go, for one is home. One rests in an inner cascade of peace and light. All yearning comes from our desire to join with God, to be full, at peace, joyous, and home. May you know Love in your heart!

When you rest in God, you just go home to yourself

When you rest in God, you just go home to yourself like the wave on the water. If the wave continues to search, she will never find the water. The only way to find the water is to go home to herself. When she realizes that she is water, she has peace. She practices resting in God in the here and the now. Although she continues to rise and fall, she is peaceful. We can practice Love as the ground of our being: Home.

January 2002 (Vol. XV, No. 1)

BLESSINGS OF NEW BEGINNINGS asw enter the fifteenth year of Friends of Silence ... prayers and loe sent out to over 5300 individuals in homes around the world ... rippling out from the Silence we eah carry within our heart-home drawing others to unite in the Silence: Home to the Divine Guest who dwells within all whose heart-door is open.

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is "look under foot." You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own home and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is of the world.

~ by John Burroughs
John Burroughs home Buy on Amazon

Harry Emerson Fosdick urges the case for peaceful homes as places of nurturance. Nevertheless, he recognizes that our homes can become bastions against the world if they are not connected to work for the sake of the world outside. Fosdick affirms the ultimate purpose of peaceful homes:

O God of life, send from above
Thy succor, swift and strong,
That from such homes stout souls may come
To triumph over wrong.

Understood in this way, our homes are places of nurture but also of preparation. From such places some stalwart souls will envision the world in new ways.

~ from ATHENA'S DISGUISES: Mentors in Everyday Life by Susan Ford Wiltshire
Susan Ford Wiltshire Athena's Disguises home Buy on Amazon

HOME is not only a refuge and a sanctuary. It can also be a workshop for the creation of our identity.

~ from SPIRITUAL LITERACY by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat Spiritual Literacy home Buy on Amazon

I have no home --
I make Awareness my home.

~ 14th Century Samurai
14th Century Samurai home

He stepped back and breathed more slowly, and what he saw, lit by warning washes of honey and gold, was a respite in stillness from the unacknowledged acts of women to hallow home. That stillness today, he thought, might be all he would ever know of the Realm of Heaven.

~ from GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE by Susan Vreeland
Susan Vreeland Hyacinth Blue home Buy on Amazon

The springs of the truest prayer and the deepest poetry, twin expressions of our outward-going passion for that Eternity which is our home, rise very near together in the heart.

~ by Evelyn Underhill
Evelyn Underhill home Buy on Amazon

Spiritual life is a response to a call. Of our own accord we would never turn away from the world and begin the long and painful journey HOME. But Someone calls to us, calls to us from within the depths of our heart, awakening our own deepest longing. This call is like a golden thread that we follow, guiding us deeper and deeper within, always pointing to the beyond. It is both intimate and allusive, for it does not belong to the mind, but to the deepest core of our being. We hear it most easily when the conscious mind is still.

~ from THE CALL AND THE ECHO by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee The Call And The Echo home Buy on Amazon

Earth is our home ... the largest living creature in our solar system. The land, the water, the air, and all the things that live on and in them form a gigantic community, an enormous cell. Here fungi, eagles, toads, worms, grasses, mosquitoes, ferns, people, dolphins, spiders, oak trees, and lions — up to ten million separately distinguishable forms of life or species — share Earth's environments. Whatever happens to one part, for good or ill, ultimately affects us all, the whole Earth: our home of abundant riches and indescribable beauty.

~ from PORTRAITS OF EARTH by Freeman Patterson
Freeman Patterson Portraits Of Earth By home Buy on Amazon

Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon in long slow-motion movements of immense majesty there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more that a moment to fully realize this is the Earth -- our home.

~ Edgar Mitchell walking on the moon
Edgar Mitchell home Buy on Amazon

It has been said many times:
HOME is WITHIN you.
You are the light of the world.
Returning Home means remembering
your own true self: Light!

The path around our home
is also the ground of awakening.

~ by Thich Nhat Hanh
Thich Nhat Hanh home Buy on Amazon

The thirst for God, the desire for unitive knowledge, is not something foreign to our nature. This desire is already in the human heart; the only reason we fail to perceive it is because it is usually covered up with petty worries and egotistical ambitions. Once these are removed, the true desire, buried in the deepest recesses of the human mind, will shine forth of itself and, like a flame, will leap toward heaven, which is its true Home.

~ the WAY OF PARADOX by Cyprian Smith
Cyprian Smith The Way Of Paradox home Buy on Amazon

Migratory birds fly very high, for three reasons. First, at a high altitude they can see better where they are going. Secondly, they are above the predatory birds that may prey on them. Thirdly, in that rarefied atmosphere they can fly very swiftly and easily. That is a parable of the way of prayer. Our souls are migratory souls. Our home is not here, but with God, to whom we seek to rise on the wings of prayer. We want to get high to see where we are going ... to rise above the noises, the fuss, and all the complications that distract and rob our lives of their own spiritual quality ... to pass swiftly to our true home, the communion of our souls with God.

~ from CHRIST THE COMPANION by F. Andrew
F. Andrew Christ The Companion home

Through the cycles and seasons of our lives' as we continue to grow in awareness, we begin to feel more at home in the world. We begin to appreciate and accept who we are... We move from periods of joyful expansion into a dark night of the soul. We seem to reap the harvest of the sustained practice of attention and compassion and come to know ourselves in a new and more forgiving light, only to forget and return to what we thought were old, discarded ways. We suffer and we experience great delight. Yet deep within is a place of understanding, and to find this place is to come home.

~ "Coming Home to Simplicity" by Molly Vass-Lehman & Paula W. Jamison in SEEDS OF AWAKENING
Molly Vass-Lehman, Paula W. Jamison Seeds Of Awakening home Buy on Amazon

In this life we are to become heaven
So that Love may find a home here.

~ by Meister Eckhart
Meister Eckhart home Buy on Amazon

Why do I forget You, abandon You?
You who are wholeness,
You who are home, always now, always present,
giving what every cell in me yearns for--
to collapse into Your warm breath of Life;
defenses drop, naked I be,
cherished solely for my nakedness,
my void, my forgetfulness.

Silence pregnant with all sounds,
I come back, prodigal that I am--
bruised, tired, wired,
To be undone again by Your embrace.

~ from "Mother Silence" by Vivian Larson
Vivian Larson Mother Silence home

Do not despise your own home and hour

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is "look under foot." You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own home and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is of the world.

Home as places of preparation

Harry Emerson Fosdick urges the case for peaceful homes as places of nurturance. Nevertheless, he recognizes that our homes can become bastions against the world if they are not connected to work for the sake of the world outside. Fosdick affirms the ultimate purpose of peaceful homes:

O God of life, send from above
Thy succor, swift and strong,
That from such homes stout souls may come
To triumph over wrong.

Understood in this way, our homes are places of nurture but also of preparation. From such places some stalwart souls will envision the world in new ways.

Pages