This Wednesday Night Meditation included a 33-minute meditation and a 49-minute talk from Rick’s series on Wise Effort, focusing on being Already Home.

This is the first in a series on Wise Effort. Many people these days are feeling discombobulated, rattled, befuddled, alarmed, outraged . . . . What to do about this?

We need clarity about the efforts that we CAN make, and we need to find authentic ways to be at peace with what is out of our hands. So this series offers simple steps we can take in our own lives to find our footing, lower the pressures, and feel calmer and clearer inside.

This talk and meditation featured several quotations which can be found under the video players below.

This talk touched on 5 different aspects that related to 5 different quotations, which are:

— ONE —
Be at home in your refuges

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those who
Age after age,
Perversely,
With no extraordinary power,
Reconstitute the world
—Adrienne Rich

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
—Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island, reprinted in Tricycle, Fall 2022, p. 120

—TWO—
Rest in the home base of your own biology
in its Green Zone, including being at home in the heart

Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.
—From The Ways We Touch: Poems. Copyright 1997 by Miller Williams.