The more I practiced, and the more I read about the practice, I realized that meditation was not meant to purge our minds of negative emotions or thought patterns, but rather meant to help us experience them without judgment. We were to let go of our resistance to pain at the deepest level and understand that we suffer not because pain is bad, but because our mind labels it as bad.
Kenji, Looking Back: My First Year as a Meditation Practitioner
The secret of life is to let every segment of it produce its own yield at its own pace. Every period has something new to teach us: The harvest of youth is achievement; the harvest of middle age is perspective; the harvest of age is wisdom; the harvest of life is serenity.
Joan Chittister, In a High Spiritual Season
The Irish word for October is Deireadh Fomhair, which means the “last harvesting” of the fruits of what we have planted earlier in the year. There is a rich crop of black berries on the hedgerows after the long Summer and mild Autumn here in Ireland. So a quote which I am fond of, and which resonates with some of the recent words on autumn, second half of life and integration:
There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another’s wounds. Lets remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.
Henri Nouwen
photo elin
To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty,
and in the same field, it beholds, every hour,
a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today is the birthday of the 13th Century Persian Poet Rumi. So here is one of my favourite short quotations, which in its few lines contains as much as we need to know.
Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
But don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Mindfulbalance 