Month: December 2018

Descending and re-emerging

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One of the lessons from nature at this time of year: seeds lie buried in darkness under ground only to re-emerge in Spring. 

Through a descent process the person gains an inner awakening, a transformation of body and mind, and then reemerges with his or her whole self in tow. The use of myth does not mean looking only to the old stories for direction. It also is about turning our daily experiences into living myths. ‘We dull our lives by the way we conceive them,’ James Hillman says. ‘We have stopped imagining them with any sort of romance, any fictional flair.’ If we tell the whole story of what came before, during, and after, on the inside and the outside, we’ll create personal myths that can help us make difficult decisions and move gracefully through transition,

Elizabeth Lesser

The calm underneath

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Another storm system passed over last evening. A very unsettled start to the winter season, reflecting a general belief here that climate patterns are changing resulting in greater extremes of weather. On the emotional level, the key is finding the still point within. 

Even in the middle of a hurricane, the bottom of the sea is calm. As the storm rages and the winds howl, the deep waters sway in gentle rhythm, a light movement of fish and plant life. Below there is no storm.

Wayne Muller, How Then, Shall We Live?: Four Simple Questions That Reveal the Beauty and Meaning of Our Lives

A Balanced way

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The modern commercial celebration of Christmas carries within it the danger of over-anticipation, where we could fall into a projection as to how everything is going to go perfectly, or is going to be suddenly different in the future. We tie our happiness to a certain form of a future moment, which only leads us to feel more discontent when we see that nothing really has changed

A different perspective is found in the Western Liturgy, which begins to sing from December 17th the beautiful “O” Antiphons, dating from the 4th Century, putting into words hopes based on a deeper perspective. The one for today asks for Wisdom, to teach us a balanced way of living. . 

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out

Vaclav Havel

Sunday Quote: Wonder

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A great person is one who has not lost the heart of a child.

Mencius, 372 – 289 BC, Chinese Philosopher

Natural change

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Moving towards the shortest day of the year this week, dark mornings and evenings. Very wild and wet again overnight. Easy to see that life is constantly changing, going up and down, with both darkness and life as just natural parts of the overall whole.

Everything — every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate — is always changing, moment to moment. We don’t have to be mystics or physicists to know this. Yet at the level of personal experience, we resist this basic fact. It means that life isn’t always going to go our way. It means there’s loss as well as gain. And we don’t like that.

Pema Chödrön, The Places that Scare you

Being led

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I think of Gloucester, blind, led through the world
To the world’s edge by the hand of a stranger
Who is his faithful son. At the cliff’s verge
He flings away his life, as of no worth,
The true way is lost, his eyes two bleeding wounds–
And finds his life again, and is led on
By the forsaken son who has become
His father, that the good may recognize
Each other, and at last go ripe to death.
We live the given life, and not the planned.

Wendell Barry,A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997