Spontaneous graces and forces..(after Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Spontaneous graces and forces (after Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Our journeys are such
that experiences of Sunday mornings
of yoga workouts..of meditation or prayer
or of riding our waves of joy
are times elevated..and other times
seem as the waiting rooms of life..
And more..the dependence on writings
of those considered most wise..provide
a temporary balm for our cloudy days..
Forgotten is the spontaneity and the equality
found at the core of all experience..
Yet..when remembered..Sundays and workouts
meditations and books..and all we do
are born anew:
Awakening that which we are..forgetting
for the moment
that which we do...
~~CC


We go to famous books for our examples of character, just as we send to England for shrubs which grow as well in our own door-yards and cow-pastures. Life is always rich, and spontaneous graces and forces elevate it in every domestic circle, which are overlooked while we are reading something less excellent in old authors. From the obscurity and casualty of those which I know, I infer the obscurity and casualty of the like balm and consolation and immortality in a thousand homes which I do not know, all round the world. And I see not why to these simple instincts, simple yet grand, all the heights and transcendencies of virtue and of enthusiasm are not open. There is power enough in them to move the world; and it is not any sterility or defect in ethics, but our negligence of these fine monitors, of these world-embracing sentiments, that makes religion cold and life low...

When I talked with an ardent missionary, and pointed out to him that his creed found no support in my experience, he replied, It is not so in your experience, but is so in the other world. I answer: Other world! There is no other world. God is one and omnipresent; here or nowhere is the whole fact. The one miracle which God works evermore is in Nature, and imparting himself to the mind. When we ask simply, "What is true in thought? what is just in action?" it is the yielding of the private heart to the Divine mind, and all personal preferences, and all requiring of wonders, are profane.

 ~~Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Sovereignty of Ethics.