Poetics of Prayer - Robert Augustus Masters

"Prayer is sacred conversation, even when it is absolutely silent.

In its beginning stages, prayer mostly asks. As it ripens, prayer may still ask, but its primary characteristic is deep, devotional receptivity. So prayer initially has a lot to say, but later on it mostly listens.

Ultimately, prayer becomes what it is requesting, through bringing us into such deep intimacy with what really matters that we're no longer significantly separated from the object of our prayer and are in fact aligned with it even though it hasn't yet physically manifested....

What real prayer seeks is recognized, at least to some degree, to be already found. There is actually no real gap between seeking and sought in bare awareness—it is only in time, only in the manifesting of prayer's requests, that there appears to be such a gap.

Prayer helps bridge the unmanifest and the manifest by creating fertile conditions for bringing potentialities to life. Prayer provides templates, sacred and otherwise, for intentionality. As it matures, prayer's context shifts from petitioning to gratitude. Then prayer does not end with a thank you but is a thank you. It is in the spirit of this that our prayer for our beloved will be most effective. The more we let go of having to have something happen here, the more likely it is to happen. No desperation, no rush, just making haste slowly....

Allow your prayer to expand, deepen, and awaken you. Let your voice, however soft, emanate from your core as much as possible. Let your whole body participate. Be bare-hearted".

- Robert Augustus Masters

Goethe

"Colors are the deeds and suffering of light." 

- Goethe

David Whyte - Crossing the Unknown Sea

"There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word
humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in
effect returning to the ground of our being.

Shedding the carapace we have been building so assiduously on the
surface, we must by definition give up exactly what we thought was
necessary to protect us from further harm. The outlaw is the radical,
the one close to the roots of existence. The one who refuses to forget
their humanity and in remembering, helps everyone else remember too.

To die inside, is to rob our outside life of any sense of arrival from
that interior. Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world.
This is the soul's individual journey, and the soul would much rather
fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's."

David Whyte - Crossing the Unknown Sea