An important guest

Waiting presents an enormous challenge.

We are impatient, I-can-fix-it kinds of people . . . but not all situations can be fixed. We assume that everything in life can be made better by taking action, but sometimes it just isn’t so. We shrink when we are presented with situations where action does no good at all. We deplore the passivity of waiting. Yet waiting is an enormous opportunity if we regard it as a wise teacher. Waiting offers us a great deal when we choose to learn.

Waiting is an important guest to honor in the guest house of our humanity. If we consciously allow waiting to be our teacher, we can accommodate waiting more peacefully. If we welcome waiting as a spiritual discipline, waiting will present its spiritual gifts. Waiting contains some of our richest spiritual opportunities if we are conscious enough and courageous enough to name them and live into them.

Holly Whitcomb, The Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting

Sunday Quote: Only if

I’ll just
     tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
     ever, possibly, see one.

Mary Oliver, The World I live in

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A time to be slow

Very cold weather here this past week.

This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.

John O’Donohue, from Beannacht, Book of Blessings

Just what’s in front of you

We must also remember that it is not our responsibility to fix all the brokenness of the world — only to fix what we can. Otherwise we become grandiose, as if we were put here to be the savior of the humanity around us.

Mindfulness and compassion are genuinely undertaken one step at a time, one person, one moment.

Jack Kornfield

Fabrications

If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth.

This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily we dedicate ourselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities – “selves”, that is to say, regarded as objects. Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them they are real).

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable

Seeing

Thinking is more interesting than knowing,
but less interesting than looking

Goethe

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