Month: February 2013

Looking within

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May you find harmony between your soul and your life.
May the mansion of your soul never become a haunted place.
May you know the eternal longing that lies at the heart of time.
May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.
May you never place walls between the light and yourself.
May you be set free from the prisons of guilt, fear, disappointment and despair.
May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.

John O’Donahoe

Sunday Quote: Seeing Deeper

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There are no unsacred places;

There are only sacred places and desecrated places.

Wendall Berry, Given

Walking in the woods this morning

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P1000210Masters of stillness, masters of light,
who, when cut by something
falling, go nowhere and heal,
teach me this nowhere,

who, when falling themselves,
simply wait to root in another direction,
teach me this falling.

Four hundred year old trees,
who draw aliveness from the earth
like smoke from the heart of God,
we come, not knowing you will hush our little want
to be big;

we come, not knowing
that all the work is so much
busyness of mind; all
the worry, so much
busyness of heart.

As the sun warms anything near,
being warms everything still
and the great still things
that outlast us

make us crack like leaves of laurel
releasing a fragrance
that has always been.

Mark Nepo, In Muir Woods

Letting the clouds pass

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clouds sun jura

The birds have vanished
into the sky,
and now the last cloud
passes away.

We sit together,
the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

Li Po

Ordinary

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or·di·nar·y/ˈôrdnˌerē/ Adjective: With no special or distinctive features; Normal

The Catholic liturgical tradition has long divided time in two:  There are two kinds of days in life and two periods of the year. The days were either feast days or ferial days. The year was divided into “ordinary” time and …well, “extra-ordinary” time, I guess. This second segment of the year, come to think about it, I never heard anyone name at all. It was a number of times: Advent, Lent,  the Christmas, Easter and Pentecost seasons. This kind of information may be boring stuff but it’s important stuff, too. Ordinary time, you see, was the longest period of all. It was the time when life went its long, dull way, predictable to the ultimate. Monday, we did the laundry; Tuesday, we did chapel, altar breads, and house-cleaning; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday we did it all again. More of the same. Same old, same old. Week after week, month after month, year after year.

 Every once in a while, of course, life was punctuated by a feast day with its special meals and polyphonic liturgies but, in the end, the normal, the daily predominated. As it does for all of us yet. The commute, the paperwork, the housework, the school run, eat up day after day with mind-numbing regularity. And yet, it is in “ordinary” time that the really important things happen: our children grow up, our marriages and relationships  grow older, our sense of life changes, our vision expands, our soul ripens. No doubt about it, [my father’s] prayer card was right: To lose the glory of ordinary time is to suffer the loss of the greater part of life.

Joan Chittister, Ordinary Time

Photo taken from the Evening Standard

Cutting speed

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The key element of practicing with this tendency is gentleness, and the method is mindfulness. Many of us practice in a speedy environment. In a sense, speed is the disease of our times. It’s always there and it’s very hard to extract ourselves from it. But we must realize that speed is in fact just a hallucination, a self-imposed reality. Being mindful cuts speed. Being present cuts speed. If we trust in basic goodness when we look at what’s going on in our life right now, kindness and patience naturally come about.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche