I want to learn how to walk down the ladder gracefully.
I have this image – I would like to get smaller and smaller in a relevant way.
Carly Simon, on what she learned from dealing with cancer and other life setbacks, quoted in Sara Davidson, The First Day of the Rest of My Life
We frequently identify quite closely with our moods…never the best idea on a Monday morning….
In a world where nothing is as fixed as it seems,
it comes as a great relief to discover that even the ego is impermanent
Mark Epstein, Advice not Given: A Guide to Getting over Yourself
The beauty of a mountain is that it is so much like a mountain, and of water that it is so much like water
Zen saying
Every year we have been witness to it: how the world descends into a rich mash, in order that it may resume. And therefore who would cry out
to the petals on the ground to stay, knowing, as we must, how the vivacity of what was, is married
to the vitality of what will be? I don’t say it’s easy, but what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world be true? So let us go on
though the sun be swinging east, and the ponds be cold and black, and the sweets of the year be doomed.
Mary Oliver, Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness
To regress in a certain way is to return to origins, to step back from the battle line of existence, to remember the gods and spirits and elements of nature, including your own pristine nature, the person you were at the beginning. You return to the womb of imagination so that your pregnancy can recycle. You are always being born, always dying to the day to find the restorative waters of night. Darkness is natural, one of the life processes. There may be some promise, the mere suggestion that life is going forward, even though you have no sense of where you are headed. It’s a time of waiting and trusting. My attitude as a therapist in these situations is not to be anxious for a conclusion or even understanding.
You have to sit with these things and in due time let them be revealed for what they are.
Thomas Moore, The Dark Night of the Soul
The festival of Samhain, which is behind modern-day Halloween, marked the end of the Celtic year and of agricultural work. People followed the rhythm of nature and wound down their activity. This festival began that period of resting, and was an occasion for meeting up, for building bonfires, celebrating the harvest and for storytelling. It was felt that the gap between the material and spiritual worlds was very thin at this time. The bonfire tradition still persists in Ireland and England to this day. The Western Churches took over the importance of this date – with its themes of endings and beginnings – and added to them remembrance for those who have gone before us. So…reminders of change but also of celebration, of fully living each moment that is given to us.
We must make good use of this life for the time we have left. This brief flash of light, like the sun appearing through the clouds.
Kalu Rinpoche
Mindfulbalance 