This morning is International Dawn Chorus Day, a worldwide celebration of music in nature.
The birders I encountered in books and in the world shared little except this simple secret:
if you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it.
Kyo McLear, Bird Art Life: A Year of Observation
photo Artemy Voikhansky
With thanks to David Kanigan at Live and Learn
See how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
Jane Hirshfield, For What Binds Us
photo Kanchelskis
A different way of seeing the challenges in life, and maybe a more helpful way of looking at the slow diversions which life obliges us to take:
Une difficulte est une lumiere. Une difficulte insurmontable est un soleil. Paul Valery
(A difficulty is a light; an insurmountable difficulty is a sun)
We tend to perceive difficulty as disturbance. Ironically, difficulty can be a great friend of creativity… I love these lines from Paul Valery: this is a completely different way of considering the awkward, the uneven, and the difficult. Deep within us, there is a terrible impulse and drive toward perfection. We want everything flattened into one shape. We do not like unexpected shapes… The imagination in its loyalty to possibility often takes the curved path rather than the linear way. Such risk and openness inherit the harvest of creativity, beauty and spirit.
John O’Donohue Anam Chara
photo kilabs
A reminder to see each day as a gift to be celebrated:
God has given us the gift of life
It is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living fully
(Dieu nous a donné le vivre; c’est à nous de nous donner le bien vivre)
Voltaire, 1694–1778, French writer, philosopher and public activist, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire: melanges. commentaires sur corneille.
Harley Swift Deer, a Native American teacher, says that each of us has a survival dance and a sacred dance, but the survival dance must come first. Our survival dance, a foundational component of self-reliance, is what we do for a living — our way of supporting ourselves physically and economically. For most people, this means a paid job. Everybody has to have a survival dance. Finding and creating one is our first task upon leaving our parents’ or guardians’ home.
Once you have your survival dance established, you can wander, inwardly and outwardly, searching for clues to your sacred dance, the work you were born to do. This work may have no relation to your job. Your sacred dance sparks your greatest fulfillment and extends your truest service to others. You know you’ve found it when there’s little else you’d rather be doing. Getting paid for it is superfluous. You would gladly pay others, if necessary, for the opportunity. Hence, the importance of self-reliance, not merely the economic kind implied by a survival dance but also of the social, psychological, and spiritual kind. To find your sacred dance, after all, you will need to take significant risks. You might need to move against the grain of your family and friends. Swift Deer says that once you discover your sacred dance and learn effective ways of embodying it, the world will support you in doing just that.
Bill Plotkin, SoulCraft
On Sunday during his sermon in Bolton Abbey, Fr Michael said that an awareness of goodness can strike at any moment, cutting through our complacency and reminding us that, deep down, there is wonder at the heart of our experience, even when we struggle and cannot see it. He saw it in the tender care of a cow for its new-born calf. Merton saw it in the swallows flight:
There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life, just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts. See within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me. It was magical.
We are already one, yet we know it not
Thomas Merton,
Mindfulbalance 