Month: July 2016

In our hands

Karl Duffy1 Comment
File:Seagull flying (5).jpg
What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun’s motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still but we move in infinite space.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Photo arnold paul

An endless longing

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File:Porto Covo July 2011-6.jpg

If you want to build a ship,

don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work,

but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

photo alvesgaspar

Keeping ourselves fluid

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:WindsUp Safety Bay 8538.JPG

Three-quarters of the world dances all night,
the waves moving as they do on the seas.

 And when the wind takes a tree in its arms,
what happens then? 

 The green branches of the earth may seem to 
reach out to touch us if we near them in a forest,
a meadow, a field. 

 Does not all sway to a rhythm that began long 
before we stood upright? 

 We are in the mountain’s home, just guests. 
Guests of the sky, the streams, the giving soil
we all nurse from. 

 Would not you be happier following their example – 
bowing in unseen ways, then rising up? 

Hafiz

Photo: JarrahTree, commons.wikimedia.org

Sunday Quote: Home

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Beach1.jpg

I have arrived,

I am home

My destination is in every step

Thich Nhat Hanh

photo Rdenton

Joy

Karl Duffy1 Comment

leaves and fungi

An eye is meant to see things.
The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: To love a genuine love.
The feet: To chase after it.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,
for learning what men have done and tried to do.

Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind
when it only wants to see why.

A lover is always accused of something.
But when he finds his love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back completely changed.

Rumi, Night and Sleep

A flash of lightning

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File:Temporale.jpg

I had a conversation the other morning with a friend on the need to have a certain lightness in the way we hold life each day, a kind of simplicity. Getting the balance between the demands of love and the pull it places on the heart on one hand and detachment  on the other is not easy. However, modern society stimulates attachment,  so the letting-go perspective of all the wisdom and religious traditions is a useful reminder.  The fact that it is a consistent presence in all cultures would suggest that it is a truth closely related to our deepest happiness:

So you should view this fleeting world
As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Diamond Sutra