Mindfulbalance

In Buddhism, the First Noble Truth acknowledges simply “There is suffering”. This helps us to simply observe and witness things as they are: impermanent, unsatisfactory and not personal. The underlying word dukkha means that ultimately conditions are “incapable of satisfying” Mary Oliver here reminds us to stay with everything in our lives, and in some sense say “It’s OK”, not because it is nice or not painful, but because it is already here. Denial is a failure of attention.

But, listen,
what’s important?
Nothing’s important

except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,
of which this is a part,
not to be denied.

Mary Oliver, Turtle

Since the start of the year it has rained almost every day, flooding fields and paths. Repeating rain, as if the planet itself is grieving. We live in a time of heightened political polarisation and threats of war. The world is not detached from what we are doing to one another and to it

Sunt lacrimae rerum

[There are tears in the nature of things]

Virgil, Aeneid,Book I

You don’t think yourself into crying. You cry yourself, if you will allow, into daring new ways of thinking and feeling. Because tears are a form of allowing more than a willing, they lend themselves much more easily to the language of spirit...

We think [wholeness is] about returning to an original, unsullied state, when in reality the prophetic way is to pass through disorder to a new stage that does not eliminate or deny the tears of things but instead includes them at a new level.

Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

Growth is less about becoming someone new and more about becoming who we truly are.

There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness;

and to know
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.

Robert Browning, Paracelsus