"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately." Henry David Thoreau Living with conscious deliberation is one of the most radical things we can do in the modern world. Although society would try to make us passive to its world view and aims, living deliberately means recovering our own agency and acting from our inmost center. It means deciding when we will imbibe the news, and how often we will leave our phone on airplane mode. It entails developing a rule of life that includes time set aside each day for solitude, meditation, prayer, reading and journalling. It means spending quality time immersed in the beauty of Nature. And it involves perpetually asking cosmic questions like "Why am I here on Earth?" "How do I develop a deeper attitude of awe and wonder?" and "What is divine union?" In the final analysis, living deliberately brings a sense of tranquillity, freedom and happiness like nothing else can. Photo: Ruddy peak and aspen trees, Maroon Lake, Maroon Bells - Snowmass Wilderness, CO, September 27, 2015 - - - - - - - - - I am available for one-on-one sessions giving instruction in Wilderness Insight Meditation and Wilderness Contemplative Prayer, or for spiritual direction / mentoring via phone or Skype. You can contact me at canyonechoes@gmail.com if you are interested. The rate is $65 per hour-long session. You might also want to check out my Spiritual Direction with Stephen Hatch Facebook page. Many of my photos are available as prints, either mounted or unmounted. Here is a link to the pricing and various mounts available: http://www.stephenhatchphotography.com/#!mounting-prices/cpr6
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"What I know is this: if God revealed himself a hundred thousand times, not one of them would resemble another. In God, everything is always new-minted, fresh-born. You are actually seeing God this moment; every moment you are seeing God's thousand colors displayed in his works and acts. Not one of God's acts resembles any other . . . The real work of religion is permanent astonishment!" Jelaluddin Rumi Muslim mystic Photo: Three-leafed Sumac sprig and lichen-covered rock, Red Mountain Open Space, Larimer County, CO, October, 2015 - - - - - - - - - I am available for one-on-one sessions giving instruction in Wilderness Insight Meditation and Wilderness Contemplative Prayer, or for spiritual direction / mentoring via phone or Skype. You can contact me at canyonechoes@gmail.com if you are interested. The rate is $65 per hour-long session. You might also want to check out my Spiritual Direction with Stephen Hatch Facebook page. Many of my photos are available as prints, either mounted or unmounted. Here is a link to the pricing and various mounts available: http://www.stephenhatchphotography.com/#!mounting-prices/cpr6 As human beings, we seem especially prone to seeing things in terms of either/or. This is true particularly in matters of religion and spirituality. A fundamentalism of words and dogma views oneness and unity as antithetical to the spirit of truth. On the other hand, a mystical fundamentalism sees words and ideas as dangerous, and silence and oneness as the true reality. Exoteric religion views our individuality as everything. Esoteric religion often thinks of every form of individuality as mere ego and seeks to annihilate it. Wilderness Mysticism notes the beauty contained in the perennial change of seasons and seeks to apply this phenomenon to the realm of religion and spirituality as well. This time of year, we realize that BOTH Autumn and Winter have their own share in reality. Right now, many of us are dwelling in the time in between the two, and the resulting coincidence of snow and colored leaves is, we have to admit, really quite stunning. Similarly, dwelling in the non-dual realm between silence and words, individuality and oneness, theism and non-theism, or traditional religion and non-traditional spirituality is the way to go for a Wilderness Mystic. Each of us may be prone to emphasize one side of the polarity, but a healthy spirituality still acknowledges the reality of the other side as well. As a contemplative, I am more weighted toward silence and oneness, but I value ideas and individuality as well, especially as they add a sense of surprise and intrigue to the realm of silence-and-oneness, and vice versa. After all, the highest nonduality - unity, Oneness - is able to embrace the positive aspects of distinction and individuality as well. If it didn't, it would not be a true non-duality. And, as I've noted on other recent occasions, REAL nonduality embraces both vertical forms of Unity (where form arises from formlessness and words come out of silence, and vice versa) AND horizontal forms of Unity (where various forms, ideas and words all mirror each other as integral aspects of a multi-faceted Whole). For each of these Two ways of perceiving is needed to complete the other. As always, Both/And is the way to go. Photos: Autumn, Winter, and the In-Between Season, Colorado and Wyoming, September and October, 2015 - - - - - - - - - I am available for one-on-one sessions giving instruction in Wilderness Insight Meditation and Wilderness Contemplative Prayer, or for spiritual direction / mentoring via phone or Skype. You can contact me at canyonechoes@gmail.com if you are interested. The rate is $65 per hour-long session. You might also want to check out my Spiritual Direction with Stephen Hatch Facebook page. Many of my photos are available as prints, either mounted or unmounted. Here is a link to the pricing and various mounts available: http://www.stephenhatchphotography.com/#!mounting-prices/cpr6 "There is great beauty and peace in this life of silence and emptiness. Solitude is a stern mother who brooks no nonsense." Thomas Merton Photo: Oak leaf, Watson Lake and Bellvue Dome, Bellvue, CO, November 11, 2015 - - - - - - - - - I am available for one-on-one sessions giving instruction in Wilderness Insight Meditation and Wilderness Contemplative Prayer, or for spiritual direction / mentoring via phone or Skype. You can contact me at canyonechoes@gmail.com if you are interested. The rate is $65 per hour-long session. You might also want to check out my Spiritual Direction with Stephen Hatch Facebook page. Many of my photos are available as prints, either mounted or unmounted. Here is a link to the pricing and various mounts available: http://www.stephenhatchphotography.com/#!mounting-prices/cpr6 Here is a 45-second mini-retreat, with a meditation bell, no words, and the wind in the trees. Recorded at Dream Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, November 14, 2015 https://www.facebook.com/stephen.hatch.902/videos/10205131323513784/?l=2825970260922406827 In the following passage written by Thomas Merton in a journal entry for June 20, 1966, "Christ" should be taken to refer to the Christ-life that dwells in every one of us, whether "Christian" or not: "Basic: the struggle for lucidity, out of which compassion can at last arise. Then you are free. That is, you are lost: there is no self to save. You simply love. Free of desire for oneself, desiring only lucidity for oneself and others. One only ceases to be absurd when, realizing that everything is absurd when seen in isolation from everything else, meaning and value are sought only in wholeness. The solitary must, therefore, return to the heart of life and oneness, losing himself or herself, not in the massive illusions, but simply in the root reality, plunging through the center of his or her own nothingness, and coming out in the All which is the Void and which is, if you like, the Love of God. "One can cease to be absurd only by experiencing the fact that there is no wall between ourselves and others, in other words, by accepting the absurdity of our own life in terms of the suffering of others: no separating 'my' pain, suffering, limitation, lostness, etc., from that of others. As long as a single person is lost, I am lost. To try to save myself by getting free from the mass of the "damned" and becoming good by myself, is to be both "damned" and absurd - as well as antichrist. Christ descended into hell to show that He willed to be lost with the lost, in a certain sense emptied so that they might be filled and saved, in the realization that now their lostness was not theirs but HIS. Hence the way one begins to make sense out of life is by taking upon oneself the lostness of everyone - and then realizing not that one has done something, or 'made sense,' but that one has simply entered into the stream of realization. The rest will work out by itself, and we do not know what that might mean." Photo: Alpenglow on Long's Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, November 14, 2015 - - - - - - - - - I am available for one-on-one sessions giving instruction in Wilderness Insight Meditation and Wilderness Contemplative Prayer, or for spiritual direction / mentoring via phone or Skype. You can contact me at canyonechoes@gmail.com if you are interested. The rate is $65 per hour-long session. You might also want to check out my Spiritual Direction with Stephen Hatch Facebook page. Many of my photos are available as prints, either mounted or unmounted. Here is a link to the pricing and various mounts available: http://www.stephenhatchphotography.com/#!mounting-prices/cpr6 "What do I need? Seriously, I need silence, thought, solitude to enter into myself to see and touch reality, to live the contemplative life." Thomas Merton I love this passage, especially because Merton understands that both thought and no-thought are necessary for a healthy contemplative life. In so doing, he presents a true non-duality. Photo: Rock formation at sunset, Vedauwoo Recreation Area, Medicine Bow National Forest, WY, November 9, 2015 - - - - - - - - - I am available for one-on-one sessions giving instruction in Wilderness Insight Meditation and Wilderness Contemplative Prayer, or for spiritual direction / mentoring via phone or Skype. You can contact me at canyonechoes@gmail.com if you are interested. The rate is $65 per hour-long session. You might also want to check out my Spiritual Direction with Stephen Hatch Facebook page. Many of my photos are available as prints, either mounted or unmounted. Here is a link to the pricing and various mounts available: http://www.stephenhatchphotography.com/#!mounting-prices/cpr6 There isn't much we can SAY that will alleviate or make sense of the suffering caused by the bombings in Paris. However, I do want to contribute what I can, and make three points. First, it is important to remember ALL of the sufferings in the world caused by hatred, animosity, war and terrorism, most of which do not get reported by the media. Second, contemplative theologian Cynthia Bourgeault speaks of the Christian tradition of "The Harrowing of Hell" that took place between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. According to this tradition, Jesus visited "hell" in order to release the souls present there. My purpose here is not to interpret this tradition - or its talk of "hell" - literally, but to learn from its spiritual meaning in the context of the current hell of this tragic terrorist event. Accordingly, in her book, "The Wisdom Jesus," Bourgeault says: "In the Harrowing of Hell, Jesus was JUST SITTING THERE - surrounded by the darkest, deepest, most alienated, most constricted state of pained consciousness: sitting, if we can imagine it, among all those faces of the collective false self, sitting there in the midst of all this blackness, not judging, not fixing; just letting it BE in love. And in so doing, he was allowing love to go deeper, pressing all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise and holding THAT to the light. A quiet, harmonizing love was infiltrating even the deepest place of darkness and blackness, in a way that didn't override them or cancel them, but gently reconnected them to the whole, holding all things in love's embrace and in such a way that released them from the grip of duality. In that ultimate letting be, he transformed them into sacred vessels of divine love. This is the mystical meaning of the great Pauline statement (in Colossians 1:17) 'In him all things hold together.' " Third, I find profound meaning in the following quotation from the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung, written in a 1945 letter: "You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life. Everyone goes through this mill, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly. We are CRUCIFIED BETWEEN THE OPPOSITES and delivered up to the torture until the 'reconciling third' takes shape. Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you, and let whatever may happen, happen . . . The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without inner contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels." In the case of both of these passages, WE OURSELVES - rather than anything we might believe or say - BECOME the reconciliation of opposites (however we might define them) that MELTS the two together in the heat of both love and inner turmoil. May each of us BECOME that reconciliation. Photo: Greyrock, burned snag, and Pasqueflowers after the High Park Fire, Roosevelt National Forest, CO, April, 2013 - - - - - - - - - I am available for one-on-one sessions giving instruction in Wilderness Insight Meditation and Wilderness Contemplative Prayer, or for spiritual direction / mentoring via phone or Skype. You can contact me at canyonechoes@gmail.com if you are interested. The rate is $65 per hour-long session. You might also want to check out my Spiritual Direction with Stephen Hatch Facebook page. Many of my photos are available as prints, either mounted or unmounted. Here is a link to the pricing and various mounts available: http://www.stephenhatchphotography.com/#!mounting-prices/cpr6 "Go the extra mile. It's never crowded." Instagram quote from yesterday Photo: Joanne hiking in Red Mountain Open Space, Larimer County, CO - - - - - - - - - I am available for one-on-one sessions giving instruction in Wilderness Insight Meditation and Wilderness Contemplative Prayer, or for spiritual direction / mentoring via phone or Skype. You can contact me at canyonechoes@gmail.com if you are interested. The rate is $65 per hour-long session. You might also want to check out my Spiritual Direction with Stephen Hatch Facebook page. Many of my photos are available as prints, either mounted or unmounted. Here is a link to the pricing and various mounts available: http://www.stephenhatchphotography.com/#!mounting-prices/cpr6 "The fresh air we need is the air of the Holy Spirit 'breathing where It pleases,' which means that the windows must be open and we must expect It to come from any direction. The error is to lock the windows and doors in order to keep the Holy Spirit within our house. The very action of locking doors and windows is fatal." Thomas Merton Photo: Fall foliage on the trail to Crater Lake, Maroon Bells - Snowmass Wilderness, CO, September 27, 2015 - - - - - - - - - I am available for one-on-one sessions giving instruction in Wilderness Insight Meditation and Wilderness Contemplative Prayer, or for spiritual direction / mentoring via phone or Skype. You can contact me at canyonechoes@gmail.com if you are interested. The rate is $65 per hour-long session. You might also want to check out my Spiritual Direction with Stephen Hatch Facebook page. Many of my photos are available as prints, either mounted or unmounted. Here is a link to the pricing and various mounts available: http://www.stephenhatchphotography.com/#!mounting-prices/cpr6 |
AuthorStephen Hatch, M.A. is a spiritual teacher and photographer from Fort Collins, Colorado. His approach is contemplative, inter-spiritual, and Earth-based. Archives
June 2016
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