Prompted by seeing a beautiful (almost) full moon in the clear Kildare sky last evening:
At night, deep in the mountains
I sit in meditation
The affairs of men never reach here
Everything is quiet and empty
The incense has been swallowed up
by the endless night;
My robe has become a garment of dew.
Unable to sleep, I walk into the woods;
Suddenly, above the highest peak,
the full moon appears.
Ryokan, Zen Buddhist monk, 1758 – 1831
photo Andrew Choy
Two quotes from Emerson on surprise and wonder to prompt us to look with fresh eyes today :
In liberated moments, we know that a new picture of life is already possible
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire, is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles
photo D Sharon Pruitt
In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.
Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak
photo fluous
Meditation comes alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement
in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self,
and to rest in awareness.
Jack Kornfield, A Mind like Sky
photo : juanedc
I was reminded of Larkin’s beautiful poem by the buds opening on the trees in the garden and on the hedgerows around here in County Kildare. This time of year moves him from a reflection on loss and grief, to thoughts on being born again, to finally being convinced to begin over again. The message is like something “almost being said”, so we need to create time to see this: we learn from nature and from this season if we are still enough to listen.
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.Philip Larkin, The Trees
I wish I could show you,
when you are lonely or in darkness
the astonishing light of your own being
Hafiz
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