Year: 2017

In our darkest night

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No seed ever sees the flower.

Zen saying

 November is the beginning of Winter in the Celtic Calendar and so today signals the beginning of the “darker half” of the year. The balance between light and darkness continues to shift. In the northern hemisphere the earth becomes colder and nature more dormant. Similar processes can occur in our lives. For example, we can choose to go with the rhythm of nature and become more reflective in this period, slowing down and simplifying things. Or our lives can have parts that seem dormant and not going anywhere. Or maybe difficulties are occurring which can seem dark and we see no escape.  However, darkness does not mean that nothing is happening.  I really like this saying from the Zen tradition – things that are now hidden or buried will eventually be seen or bear fruit.  That what is now just germinating will be full of life in time. As humans we like to see immediate results. However, for now, all we can do is wait and trust. Peace comes from knowing the right way to let go. 

Hold what is happening lightly

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Just stay at the center of the circle,

and let all things take their course. 

Tao Te Ching

Softening our bodies and mind

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Contentment doesn’t mean we are always happy about life events or deny the reality of pain. We cultivate contentment by cultivating the inner witness who is able to respond to life from a place of calmness, peace, and tranquility. So it is the ‘still heart’ — the heart of equanimity — that can welcome everything in. Instead of always living with a sense of dissatisfaction about our lives, or anticipation over what comes next, we live in the knowledge that this moment contains everything we need to be at peace, to experience freedom, to develop compassion for ourselves and others, to find God.  When we experience contentment we have softened our bodies, minds, and hearts so that we are able to release the unconscious resistances we hold to our own experience.

Christine Valters Paintner, Lectio Divina

Sunday Quote: Kindness

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Modern society prizes intelligence, achievements or efficiency…

What wisdom can you find

that is greater than kindness?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Quelle sagesse trouverez-vous supérieure à la bonté?

We rush through the day, we miss so much

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Another Autumn Saturday, two more poets.

Very foggy all day yesterday, a good metaphor for how we live our lives sometimes. 

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

Denise Levertov, Witness. 

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished.

Mary Oliver, Sometimes      

Where are you going?

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We frequently get caught up in work, and identify with the pressing demands there, which pull us along and create a sense of great importance.

There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man standing alongside the road, shouts, “Where are you going?” and the first man replies, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don’t know where we are going, and we can’t stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war within ourselves…We have to learn the art of stopping – stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. 

 Thích Nhât Hanh, The Heart of the Buddhas Teaching