Dark and foggy. The mountains hidden. All we can be sure of is this moment. We do not really know what the future holds. We construct the future not by dreaming how we would like it to be, but by living the reality of what is in our life at this moment.
The future is completely open,
and we are writing it moment to moment.
Pema Chodron
One’s life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage
Anaïs Nin
Went walking early yesterday alongside the lake in Divonne. It was completely frozen, a barren landscape. The bare trees were stripped down to their essentials, the ground hard. The ducks and swans were walking on the surface of the lake, white in the cold morning air. One wonders what they eat, if they will survive this cold, if the natural cycles are too hard for them. For us too, there are natural cycles, natural learning. Sometimes it may feel like a struggle to just survive. At other times it seems that we are in different phases of growth, such as when we arrive at the end of a year. One thing we do at this time is look back and see what will grow into next year and what to let go of.
Every year
everything I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation, whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go
Mary Oliver
There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home.
Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.
Josephine Hart, Damage
I have been reflecting these days on how our sense of self is related to finding a space where we can feel safe, which we can be “at home”. It may be a place, but it is more likely found in the acceptance and love of others. We search for this all our lives. Without it we are restless, even lost.
One way to express the crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there.
Henri Nouwen
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.
Maya Angelou
There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.
Hafiz
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