Wingsong Sanctuary

23/10/2023

The Holiness of Time
An astonishing benefit accrues from giving up the incessant demand for activity and allowing our souls to bask in divine light. By sinking into the holiness of time, the contemplative person makes progress through inaction. Our time is not God’s time. When we follow the rhythm of what is eternal and immaterial, we have entered an enchanted universe—a freedom of being and a sanctuary of rest.

23/10/2023

20/10/2023

Begin

What is your relationship
To beginning-less love?

Now is where the needle of time
Touches the vinyl of life

This question/answer far more
Than thoughts can gather

This Love is known physically
Not mentally or emotionally

Do you need an intermediary?
A transducer, seducer or icon?

Even so, Love is immediate
Without time

Spaceless
Without symbols

This character of yours
Is bathed in love, made of love

Yet how keenly we hold tight
Our troubles against the heart

The shield of separation
This membrane of our shape

To trust love is to discover
Being vaster than mind

We've maybe glimpsed
Yet always snapped back

The familiar shape of littleness
Unbreakable faith in our concerns

Yet love asks for nothing
But your present acceptance

This moment
This moment

How is your relationship
With beginningless love?

Kieran Patrick Riordan

27/08/2023

30/07/2023

The Dream of a Child

Under an unknowable sky,
The vast canopy,
Named Infinite Life;

Are woven our briefest forms,
Their laboured breath.
The storied strife

Briefly, we touch the Earth
And like a child
We explore, we fret and plan;

We do our best
Within limited means
To discover what we can.

In the twinkling of a star,
Our threads unravel,
Pulled from the cloth of space;

Our little life over.
The eternally divine,
Harvests a dreamers face

Kieran Patrick Riordan

14/06/2023

POSTCARDS

Postcards from a dream
Beautiful and ugly,
Our little stories,
Moments,
On loan from eternity.

This tiny organic
Recording device
Locates Me here.
As the silent heart
Sings oceanic.

Temporal self
Roaring drunk
Binges experience
Then rehab again
The meditation retreat.

Where sobriety
Allows uncomfortable dialogue
Pointing to silence,
The source of peace
In a seductive world

Accepting, yielding
Behind life’s hunger
Trusting breath,
Invites solace and safety
In the present arising

Each comes to this
In their own way
No two knots alike
An intimacy
With the ordinary
Unrecognisable to the entranced

Doing dishes, washing clothes.
Caring for your friend.
Showing up for work,
E-motion high or low.
A ballet of beauty.
Upon a stage of compassion.

Kieran Patrick Riordan

31/05/2023

“Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.”

― Kahlil Gibran

27/05/2023

Lovers are already drowned in the sweet waters of love.
So for the already sweetened lovers,
it doesn’t really matter if more sugar is brought in from wherever!

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They are in each other all along.
Let your song of love be always heard.
This is the final message of Sufi mystics:

When you find love, you will find yourself.
When you have the knowledge of love,
you will then feel peace in your heart.
Stop searching here and there,
the Jewels are inside you.

This, my friends, is the holy meaning of love.

Beloved Rumi

23/05/2023

"Silence reveals itself only to itself. Only when we enter as nothing and stay as nothing, will silence open its secret. Its secret is itself. That’s why I say all the words, all the books, all the teachings, and all the teachers can only get you to the door, and perhaps entice you to enter. Once there, you start to feel the presence of silence very powerfully.
When this happens, something spontaneously arises that’s willing to enter it without being somebody.
That is the sacred invitation.
Inside you find that silence is the final and ultimate teacher and the final and ultimate teaching.
It’s the only teacher that won’t speak to you. Silence is the only teacher and teaching that keeps our humanness on its knees all the time. With any other teaching or teacher, we find we can get up. We can think, “Oh, I heard Adya said dah-dah-dah, and it sounds good,” and we find ourselves lifting up off the floor of surrender. We turn away from our most sacred and beautiful humility.

Silence is the ultimate and best teacher, because in silence is the neverending welcoming to do that which our human heart truly desires, which is to always be with our knees on the floor, always be in that sort of devotion to Truth. Silence is the only teaching and the only teacher that is there all the time. Every minute that you are awake, every minute that you are alive, every minute that you breathe, it’s right there."
adyashanti

09/05/2023

adyashanti :

04/05/2023

A Safe Harbor for Holiness
We are constituted to turn toward the light, we are constituted to seek the divine. We are constantly being called to Love itself, which permeates the universe. And once we give our whole selves to the path, pour our hearts into the world without expecting anything in return, we become sowers of the gift. We are no longer waiting to be whole and complete. We are no longer feeling that we’ve been abandoned or betrayed. Instead, we realize that we are tasked with serving as a safe harbor for holiness in others, being agents of growth, and transforming the pains of our world.

Beverly Lanzetta, unpublished lecture, Sanctifying the Day, 2021.

02/05/2023

Kia Ora Whanua,

As many of you know, our beloved Wingsong is transitioning! Many of us have shared memories in the temple and garden in dance, song, prayer and moving with the ever changing tides of life.
I feel super blessed to be with her for this final cycle, but of course it is never the end!

Timetable for upcoming events ~

Wednesday ~ ‘QiGong’ with Jimmy (starting next week) ~ 6pm
Thursday ~ ‘Move, Sing, Play’ with Mo and Friends- We begin this week with a song circle ~ 7pm
Friday ~ ‘Earth- Womb’ Wahine Series - starting 12th May, Led by Brooke and Bee (PM for further details) ~ 7pm
Sunday ~ ‘Moon Ritual’ with Karena (for just this Sunday at this stage)

We will post as events come up with pricing ~ or you can contact the facilitator directly.

Looking forward to celebrating life with you all soon,

In love,

Rebecca Bee X

01/05/2023

"God is already present. God's Spirit is dwelling within us. We cannot search for what we already have. We cannot talk God into coming "to" us by longer and more urgent prayers. All we can do is become quieter, smaller, and less filled with our own self and our constant flurry of ideas and feelings.

Then God will be obvious in the very now of things, and in the simplicity of things. To sum it all up, we can never get there, we can only be there."
--Richard Rohr

29/04/2023

Angels are wonderful but they are so, well, aloof.
It’s what I sense in the mud and the roots of the
trees, or the well, or the barn, or the rock with
its citron map of lichen that halts my feet and
makes my eyes flare, feeling the presence of some spirit, some small god, who abides there.

If I were a perfect person, I would be bowing
continuously.
I’m not, though I pause wherever I feel this
holiness, which is why I’m so often late coming
back from wherever I went.

Forgive me.

~ Mary Oliver

07/04/2023

… how to be
opening doorways
to the beyond
thru the simplicity
of everyday life …
🌀

05/04/2023

.. . to the morrow . .

down a garden path. . .. . ..adrift from worldly travail.. sown under full luminescence

03/04/2023

When I was the stream,
When I was the forest,
When I was still the field,
When I was every hoof, foot, fin and wing,
When I was the sky itself,
No one ever asked me did I have a purpose,
No one ever wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing I could not love.
It was when I left all we once were that the agony began,
the fear and questions came, and I wept,
I wept.
And tears I had never known before.
So I returned to the river,
I returned to the mountains.
I asked for their hand in marriage again,
I begged - I begged to wed every object and creature.

~ Meister Eckhart

30/03/2023

“be beautiful
on the way
to the answer
- that is the answer ….”
martin prechtel

30/03/2023

view this subtle & sublime offering 🌀

https://www.wingsongsanctuary.com/sanctuary-stay

24/03/2023

A Prayer

Let us dwell in the solitude of our hearts, bow before the holy mystery of love, and be a person of God who is not defined by our task-produced list. We ask to be led ever deeper into the source of love and generosity. We pray, O Merciful One, to open our hearts. We are in awe of your compassion. We wish to embody your living breath of joy, to learn repentance and forgiveness, to soothe every sorrow with tenderness. May we find the strength to bear the vulnerability of being. May our hearts be worthy of Your Life.

Amen.

Beverly Lanzetta, unpublished lecture, Sanctifying the Day, 2021.

16/03/2023

When you take time to sit, in stillness... Doing nothing. Just being. Allowing your mind to quiet, your energy naturally becomes more fine, harmonious and is clarified. This reordering of your energy is a natural part of Life. It’s always available to you, as a way of centering, refreshing, realigning and coming home to who you truly are.

The real you is infinite, spacious, timeless, eternal. And always expanding. When you are in resonance with All That You Are, you feel this way. You feel spacious, free, wide open, flowing. And you have a sense of time standing still, or being wide open, spacious.

We suggest you get to know this state of being. Knowing, that doing so is getting to know the REAL YOU. The eternal you. And this practice can teach you, through the entrainment of the energy of All You Are, alignment — your vaster wholeness teaches you how to be in and come into alignment with all you have become.

Once you’re more familiar with this way of being you may find that you notice a still, clear, true center within you, throughout the day. It’s always been there, but you may have been less aware of it previously…..

14/03/2023

THE JOURNEY: We are constantly astonished to find, that fully one half of any life and any conversation is mediated through disappearance and loss rather than success, through standing still rather than movement, and through a kind of giving up instead of taking on: which means that most human beings are at war with actualities of reality at least fifty percent of the time. Making peace with this necessary and cyclical giving away, this invitation to stopping, in our moveable transient world, is to make peace with a part of our selves often neglected and untouched. Our vitality is intimately linked to our vulnerability, to our willingness to be undone as much as to do, to let go as much as to take on, to allow ourselves to be found as much as to seek, to find our arrivals in often great departures, even as now, against our seemingly conscious will.
DW

13/03/2023

Statues in Time

Are you acquainted with the character of silence?

With silence,
You need no pretence.
No secret too dark,
No leaks,
Nor threats.

Where else but in silence
Can you safely trace,
The echo of every bruise
That has blossomed,
Upon the membrane of your soul.

Who but silence,
Listens rapt and inexhaustible,
To your aching stories,
Both old and new.

No agony unbearable,
Nor piercing shame,
No sadness so cloying,
That cannot be shared
In the deep quiet.

Remain naked
In a daily silence,
Your original light
Will melt you;
Your hardened chest
Your rigid belly.

You'll be shown a hidden alchemy:
Where all statues
You've gathered
In the garden of time,
Are outshone forever.

Kieran Patrick riordan

05/03/2023

an eye looking at me .. . .
a smell, smelling me ... . .
a taste, tasting me . . .. .
a memory making me, a sin forgiving me . . . ...

The puddle of my handwritten story, forgetting me . …
when I unfurl my fingers, I withold abundant nourishment reflecting light’s birth

The breath, water, feet and light dimensions
envelop me in a full presence.. . .

- raya

05/03/2023

Silence and stillness are not dependent on the mind being silent. There is a deeper silence and stillness in you.
Adyashanti.