Month: April 2018

Beyond limitations

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Souls get big from opening out beyond the limitations of human knowledge and control.

Everyone is called to be a mystic of some sort, and being open to mystery and myth, the intuitive and the non-rational, to art and ritual, to nature and animals, to absurd ideas and outrageous fantasies gives the soul room to fashion a lovable and thoughtful human being. However simple your life, however ordinary and retiring, you can have a mega-soul, a vast source of vitality, and the capacity for pain and failure as well. You can be noble in your simplicity and deep and wide in your ability to contain life.

Thomas Moore

Masks

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Everyone has a life that is different from the ‘I’ of daily consciousness, a life that is trying to live through the ‘I’ who is its vessel. This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches; there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self. The soul is like a wild animal; tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.

Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

Complaining

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Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself….

The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations.

What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy.

The implication is always: this should not be happening;

I don’t want to be here; I don’t want to be doing this; I’m being treated unfairly.

And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

There must be time

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As concerns the art of living, the material is your own life.
No great thing is created suddenly.
There must be time.

Give your best and always be kind.

Epictetus, AD 55 – 135, Greek Stoic philosopher

Sunday Quote: Where we are

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Our humble way… is to root ourselves –  

beneath the thousand dreams and excuses

that keep us from the ground we walk.

Mark Nepo.

Transitions

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It has been a very slow transition this year….

One of the beautiful transitions in nature is the transition from winter to springtime. An old Zen mystic said, when one flower blooms it is spring everywhere. When the first innocent, infant-like flower appears on the earth, one senses nature stirring beneath the frozen surface. There is a lovely phrase in Gaelic, ‘ag borradh’, meaning that there is a quivering life about to break forth. The wonderful colours and the new life the earth receives makes spring a time of great exuberance and hope. In a certain sense, spring is the youngest season. Winter is the oldest season. Winter was there form the very beginning. It reigned amidst the silence and bleakness of nature for hundreds of millions of years before vegetation. Spring is a youthful season; it comes forth in a rush of life and promise, hope and possibility. At the heart of the spring there is a great inner longing. It is the time when desire and memory stir towards each other. Consequently, springtime in your soul is a wonderful time to undertake some new adventure, some new project, or to make some important changes in your life. If you undertake this, when it is springtime in your soul, then the rhythm, the energy and the hidden light of your own clay works with you. You are in the flow of your own growth and potential. Springtime in the soul can be beautiful, hopeful and strenghtening. You can make difficult transitions very naturally in an unforced and spontaneous way.

John O’Donohue,  Anam Cara