Month: January 2017

Fresh starts

Karl Duffy7 Comments

File:Love-romantic-date-candlelight (23958771669).jpg

A friend reminded me yesterday that it is all about starting each day anew, with fresh eyes –  like lighting a candle in the darkness and seeing things in the glow of a kind light:

I’m heading into 2017 aspiring to look at life through the eyes of a child. Buddhists call it “beginner’s mind” — a corrective to the cynicism that comes when we let hard realities darken our vision and diminish our imagination. It’s a way of looking at the world that doesn’t deny the darkness, but makes fresh starts possible in everything – from our personal to our political lives.

What’s “the growing edge” in your life?

Whatever it is, may 2017 be a year in which our adult powers dance with our child-like imaginations to help make all things new.

Parker Palmer

With thanks to makebelieveboutique.com

Setting out in trust

Karl Duffy1 Comment

path

We sometimes think we know the way we are going….

A person often meets his destiny on the road which he takes to avoid it

L‘homme rencontre souvent son destin sur la route qu’il emprunte pour l’éviter

Jean de la Fontaine, 1621 – 1695, French poet and writer of Fables

Begin again

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Often the message this time of year is to completely re-shape or transform ourselves. This can sometimes mask a kind of aggression towards ourselves and suggest that most change needs to be dramatic. In most cases acceptance, integration and starting over are what is really needed :

That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb,  when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.

Mark Nepo, Hearing the Cries of the World

Not seen but real

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.

Hafiz

Qualities for a full life

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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Rumi’s advice for us if we want to fully take part in the dance this year. Courage to make the first step will always be a good idea….

There’s courage involved if you want

to become truth.  There is a broken-

open place in a lover.  Where are

those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion in this group?  What’s the

use of old and frozen thought?  I want

a howling hurt.  This is not a treasury

where gold is stored; this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that

can heat up and change.  Lukewarm

won’t do. Halfhearted holding back,

well-enough getting by?  Not here.

Rumi

Sunday and New Year Quote: Just Dance

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:U.S. Navy Cryptologic Technician Technical 3rd Class Emily Garcia-Delgado dances with a child at the Thanh Tam Special School while members of the U.S. 7th Fleet Band ensemble Orient Express perform in Da Nang 110717-N-XR557-090.jpg

Every child has known God

Not the God of Names

Not the God of Don’ts

Not the God who never does anything weird

But the God who only knows four words

And keeps repeating them, saying

“Come Dance with Me”

Come Dance.

Hafiz