Though my family landed in the Midwest, we lived in urban or suburban environments. It was only after my husband and I built our house in Lake County, Illinois, near Libertyville, that my consciousness changed. On the first morning in our new home I woke up to the mooing of cows. Cows under my window, 35 miles northwest of Chicago! But there they were, rubbing against the fence that separated our one-acre lot from our neighbor’s 200-acre estate, and they were Holsteins, the only cows I knew from vacations in the flat North German countryside of my childhood. That was my initiation, and after 40 years in this house I know what time of day it is by the way the light slants. I am intimately familiar with the names and habits of the wildflowers and the birds that live in our hawthorns and aspens. We all live together, in the world and in my poems. Lisel Mueller

My family went through terrible times. In Europe no one has had a private life not affected by history. I’m constantly aware of how privileged we (Americans) are. Lisel Mueller

Lisel Mueller

 Monet Refuses the Operation 

 

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen Cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

“Monet Refuses the Operation” by LISEL MUELLER.

Cow Cuddling

Article

Forget touching grass. Cow cuddling is the new best way to get grounded.

Everything was quiet. It was just me and Barley. There was nothing left to do other than take in the calming company of this peaceful bovine.  

The freer I get, the higher I go. The higher I go, the more I see. The more I see, the less I know. The less I know, the more I’m free.

― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

Our journey is about being more deeply involved in Life and yet less attached to it.
― Ram Dass

Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.

― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into.

― Ram Dass

The cosmic humor is that if you desire to move mountains and you continue to purify yourself, ultimately you will arrive at the place where you are able to move mountains. But in order to arrive at this position of power you will have had to give up being he-who-wanted-to-move-mountains so that you can be he-who-put-the-mountain-there-in-the-first-place. The humor is that finally when you have the power to move the mountain, you are the person who placed it there--so there the mountain stays.
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

In mystical traditions, it is one's own readiness that makes experiences exoteric or esoteric. The secret isn't that you're not being told. The secret is that you're not able to hear.

― Ram Dass

Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts... if we can keep them open to God, will find their own intuitive way.

― Ram Dass

We're being trained through our incarnations--trained to seek love, trained to seek light, trained to see the grace in suffering.     
― Ram Dass

Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.

― Ram Dass

It's very different because the Indians live as if they are their souls and Americans live as if they are their egos.

― Ram Dass

Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being, we are enough.

― Ram Dass

When we see the Beloved in each person, it's like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.
― Ram Dass

 The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that's happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.”
― Ram Dass

Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we're so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is the supreme creative act.

― Ram Dass

 Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.

― Ram Dass

Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one. When many people have this heart connection, then we will know that we are all one, we human beings all over the planet. We will be one. One love. And don’t leave out the animals, and trees, and clouds, and galaxies-it’s all one. It’s one energy.

― Ram Dass