Another Spring haiku.
Inner contentment arises when we recognise that what we have, right now, is enough. When the mind is calm, the outer world feels aligned with it. We are friends with life and with other people
In the shadow of the cherry blossom,
there is no such thing
as a stranger
Kobayashi Issa, 1763 – 1828.
We cannot control our life. If we are set upon doing so, we have abdicated from peace, which must balance what is desired with what is possible.
As Hokusai shows so memorably, the great wave is in waiting for any boat. It is unpredictable, as uncontrollable now as it was at the dawn of time. Will the slender boats survive or will they be overwhelmed?
The risk is a human constant; it has to be accepted – and laid aside. What we can do, we do. Beyond that, we endure, our endurance framed by a sense of what matters and what does not. The worst is not that we may be overwhelmed by disaster, but to fail to live by principle. Yet we are fallible, and so the real worst, the antithesis of peace, is to refuse to recognise failure and humbly begin again.
Sr Wendy Beckett The Art of Lent: A Painting A Day From Ash Wednesday To Easter
The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle: Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses, it swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next.
Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go.
Just remain in the center, watching.
And then forget that you are there.
Lao Tzu, Hua Hu Ching
This is another day, Lord.
I know not what it will bring forth, but make me ready for whatever it may be.
If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely.
If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently.
And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly.
Make these words more than words. Amen.
1979 Book of Common Prayer
The branches are clearly different lengths. But “better” and “worse” are not in the branches. They are in the comparing mind. What would it be like to give ourselves a break from labelling everything “good” or “bad.”
In a Spring meadow,
nothing is superior, nothing inferior.
The flowering branches
are just themselves:
some short, some long.
Ryokan
Now I become myself.
It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—“
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!…
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant….
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I love
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
May Sarton, 1912 – 1995, American Poet, Now I Become Myself [extracts]
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