May 8 — The Unmoored Life
Living Sufism is sponsored and presented by The Sufi Way
The Unmoored Life- Angelika- Closing thoughts.
Thank you for being here today , with each other, with your Self, - for being open to reaching into yourself in response to our simple yet powerful calls, open to reaching out in your groups to each other, in which ever way this emerged….
I hope that, wherever you may have landed, in yourself and with each other, that it feels possible for you to allow this experience , without judgement, to open and surrender to it-
Because wherever you find yourself now in your own experience of feeling moored and feeling unmoored, happily and unhappily, after our process today, this IS afterall, Your lived experience, YOUR own unavoidable aliveness today, …..the lived edge of your being right now. I hope that you can trust this- whatever your experience is –
Perhaps you found yourself a little distracted or lost, maybe a little fearful or self limiting, or perhaps today has felt deepening and enlivening for you, …..maybe you found a refreshed sense of what it is to be on your particular human journey, to be constantly leaving then coming home again and again, to your Self , Your journey with all its landing stages, stories, pains, pleasures, attachments , disattachments, gains and losses, connections…-
I wonder whether you may have noticed any new internal connections today, and maybe you made new external connections with each other too?
Whatever happened here for you today, I sincerely hope you may leave with a refreshed clarity and commitment to a sense of your purpose in your human journey- a purpose that may include - living from your truest experiences and the call of a purpose that may include following the scent of your own fullest sense of aliveness – and then trusting the directions and the openings that emerge for you, along that path…, allowing for rest , grounding and for exploration and new unknowns as they present themselves to you….
Perhaps we may also leave each other today with a renewed sense of the precious interconnectedness of our being here together, and of our uniquely individual and yet our common ground and our common purpose-
A purpose , a call perhaps, to come home again and again, into our true nature and to sustain and call and respond to each other in this purpose, along the way.
Like a field full of sunflowers turning with each other, again and again, towards the light.
At one point in our conversations about attachment and freedom, purpose and aimlessness, and so on we realized that we are heliotropic, that each of us is naturally drawn toward light. We might describe our particular “lights'' in different ways, but there is something constantly calling us to which we turn without even thinking. We wound up calling this the “sunflower effect”. ~The Curators
SUNFLOWER QUOTATIONS
“I want to be like a sunflower, so that even on the darkest days, I will stand tall and find the sunlight.”
“If I were a flower… I would be a sunflower. To always follow the sun, turn my back to darkness, stand proud, tall and straight even with my head full of seeds.”
– Pam Stewart
“Be like a flower and turn your face to the sun.” – Kahlil Gibran
“Despite knowing they won’t be here for long, they still choose to live their
brightest lives — sunflowers.” – Rupi Kaur
“The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but
we have to be taught, it seems.” – Richard Rohr
“Always look at the brighter side of life, just like the sunflower, which looks upon the sun, not the dark clouds.”
“The flower that follows the sun does so even in cloudy days.”– Robert Leighton
“Advice from a sunflower. Be bright, sunny and positive. Know your roots. Spread seeds of happiness. Rise, shine and hold your head up high. Keep on growing. Even on the darkest days, stand tall and find the sunlight.”
“Someone was sitting in front of a sunflower, watching the sunflower, a cup of sun, and so I tried it too. It was wonderful; I felt the whole universe in the sunflower. That was my experience. Sunflower meditation. A wonderful confidence appeared. You can see the whole universe in a flower. “
– Shunryu Suzuki
"Light-enchanted sunflower, thou
Who gazest ever true and tender
On the sun's revolving splendour."
– Pedro Calderon de la Barca
The Leaf That Is Not a Leaf: Moored or Unmoored?
Considering attachment, considering roots, considering drift and freefall and soaring and somewheres neither here nor there...consider this small story:
Soon after its liberation from Nazi occupation in 1944, Greece lurched into civil war. The poet George Seferis, long in service to the government in exile, returned to his homeland and in 1946 found himself revisiting the Greek countryside for the first time in six years. “I am trying,” he said, “to return to the habit of work.” This work proved not impossible, but also not at all as he’d imagined. From his journal:
…you thought it was the war, the difficult circumstances
which would end with some sort of ‘peace.’ Suddenly you discover
that you’ll spend your entire life in disorder. It’s all that you have;
you must learn to live with it.
It was there on the tiny island of Poros, in a rented house named Galini (“serenity”), in a period ripped by political anguish, that his big poem “Thrush” began to emerge. Titled after a small shipwreck he’d come upon while swimming, it is a poem in many ways about houses, and begins “The houses I had they took away from me.” A draft in his journal ends like this:
Contours of mountains, contours of sounds.
Smoke under the nostrils of a god.
The leaf on a tree that is only a leaf is not a leaf.
And you are in a big house with many open windows,
and you run from room to room, knowing not from which to look out first
lest the pines leave…
The day after writing this verse, he notes, “I made out of a walnut and a few acorns a small doll which I named Mrs. Zen. It was impossible to do anything else.”
Many years later, in 1968, he became a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. Asked how he liked being a student again, he replied “The problem which puzzles me is: What is advanced study? Should one try to forget, or to learn more?” By then he’d become known for telling jokes. His delivery was straight, and if you laughed, his face at once became fierce: “Why are you laughing!” Then a smile. Once another writer referred to him in a poem as a Middle-Eastern troglodyte. Shown the poem, Seferis responded, “Middle-Eastern troglodyte. Ridiculous and inaccurate. I once called myself a Cappadocian troglodyte, and that is what I plan to remain.” A fierce look. “Why are you laughing!” ~trace farrell
Home has always been one of the most important things. If I don't feel at home in my space, then I feel really unmoored. Nate Berkus
Without our artists and storytellers, we have no history, and without history our future is unmoored -- we drift. It is art, never war, that carries culture forward. Sharon E. McKay
People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life. James Baldwin
Stability of heart - commitment to the life of the soul, faithfulness to the community, perseverance in the search for God - is the mooring that holds us fast when the night of the soul is at its deepest dark, and the noontime sun sears the spirit. Joan D. Chittister
Hadn't we yearned for escape, reinvention, new identities? Hadn't we each, in the end, unmoored ourselves by cutting loose the anchors that weighed us down? Khaled Hosseini
We long to belong, and belonging and caring anchors our sense of place in the universe. Patricia Churchland
Do more than belong: participate. Do more than care: help. Do more than believe: practice. William Arthur Ward
Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone. Margaret J. Wheatley
Like a well-oiled machine, we’ve all been connected since the beginning of time through a beautiful, mystical process of unity. Amy Leigh Mercree
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. Simone Weil
We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.
Charles Eisenstein
This program is sponsored and presented by The Sufi Way
*You can find the essay, "Beloved Community" by Pir Elias Amidon here
Quotes on Unmoored and Moored Lives
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