A little something different today.

Though we typically do not record any part of our Saturday Gatherings, today I recorded the opening ten or so minutes. This is the announcements segment of our time together. It’s where I – among other things – offer a short summary of what took place during our proceeding Tuesday and Thursday.

I did this because these week-day events and this weekending ‘elevator speech’ communicated something important. All said something about how I was meeting a bit of overwhelm that’s come up recently. More crucially, all reminded us of something that is central to the Online Gatherings – at least to my understanding of this community.

This is the matter of how meditation might come alive in our lives. How we might let what we touch in our practice – the clarity, tenderness, and communicativeness of our basic nature – flow into and even guide our lives.

Rather than attempt any further articulation of this here, I instead direct you to the short video posted above.

Once you’ve finished viewing this, perhaps you might read the words below. Someone sent me this passage after Thursday’s Gathering. It’s easy to understand why. Though the author, Rainer Maria Rilke, uses very different language than I do, his sense of the ‘artist’s way’ aligns beautifully with the ‘meditator’s way’ noted that I describe as ‘bringing meditation to life’:

“All progress must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion, wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth hour of a new clarity, that alone is living the artist’s life. In understanding as in creating, there is no measure with time, no year matters, and far years are nothing. Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree that does not force its sap and stands confidently in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful. Patience is everything.”