Month: December 2015

Things moving on

Karl Duffy4 Comments

barrow

The end of 2015 sees dark rivers bursting their banks, and high winds blowing all before them. Everything in movement. We see what to hold onto 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, Black Water Woods

photo of the River Barrow at Bagenalstown, December 30th.

Fearless receptivity

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Berezhnytsya (Explore!).jpg

We can’t travel with others in territory that we haven’t explored ourselves. It is the exploration of our own inner life that enables us to form an empathetic bridge to the other person.  It’s our task to trust, to listen, and to pay careful attention to the changing experience. At the deepest level, we are being asked to cultivate a kind of fearless receptivity.

This is a journey of continuous discovery in which we will always be entering new territory.  We have no idea how it will turn out, and it takes courage and flexibility. We find a balance.  The journey is a mystery we need to live into, opening, risking, and forgiving constantly.

Frank Ostaseski

photo juanedc

Gaps

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Cheltenham Spa Station ... MIND THE GAP. (6191893794).jpg

The ‘law of white spaces’ is an important piece of universal legislation that we ignore at our personal and collective peril. The law states that it is the white space between the words on a page that make it readable. Or the silence between two musical notes. Or the rest between periods of action. Without periods of silence and non-action our words and our deeds jumble up into meaningless spirals of stress. We need a web of silence spread around the world just as extensively as the web of technology.

Laurence Freeman, Web of Silence

A good way to measure

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Colours of Happiness 3.jpg

I read in Brand’s “Popular Antiquities” that “Bishop Stillingfleet observes, that among the peoples of the northern nations, the Feast of the New Year was observed with more than ordinary jollity: thence, as Olaus Wormius and Scheffer observe, they reckoned their age by so many Iolas.” (Iola: to make merry) So may we measure our lives by our joys.

We have lived, not in proportion to the number of years that we have spent on the earth,

but in proportion as we have enjoyed

Henry David Thoreau, Journals (1860)