You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, but you mustn’t wish for another life.
The chance you have is the life you’ve got.
You mustn’t want to be somebody else.
What you must do is this: Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
Wendell Berry
I don’t tell the murky world
to turn pure.
I purify myself
and check my reflection
in the water of the valley brook.
Ryoken, 1758–1831, Zen monk and poet
We already know how to let go – we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.
Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no,
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.
Rumi
As I walk through the woods along the lake, I’m quickened by nature’s palette of subtle and vivid colors. At the same time — as the leaves drop and the dark skeletons of the trees begin to emerge — I’m sobered by the fact that all green, growing, and glorious things must pass away.
And yet, as the years go by, the more I find that these two feelings dance with each other. The fact that all things must die makes me ever more grateful for the beauties of nature and human nature.
If we let that gratitude animate us to care for the natural and human communities, then what falls to the ground around us and among us will seed the flowering of new life.
As Rilke says in this lovely and well-known poem, “…there is Someone, whose hands, infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.”
We are that Someone’s hands. Let’s hold all this falling in ways that will help the earth and its creatures rise…
Parker J. Palmer
This then is life.
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.
How Curious! How real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.
Walt Whitman
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