Month: December 2023

Been seen

Karl Duffy16 Comments

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

David Whyte

Beannachtaí na Nollaig oraibh go léir

(Christmas blessings from Ireland to all of you who drop by or who read each day)

Sunday: The messiness of real life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

It’s odd in a way, this business of Perfect Christmasses. The story of the first Christmas is the story of a series of completely unplanned, messy events – a surprise pregnancy, an unexpected journey that’s got to be made, a complete muddle over the hotel accommodation when you get there… Not exactly a perfect holiday.

But it tells us something really vital. We try to plan all this stuff and stay in charge, and too often (especially with advertisers singing in our ears the whole time) we think that unless we can cook the perfect dinner, plan the perfect wedding, organise the perfect Christmas, we somehow don’t really count or we can’t hold our heads up.

But in the complete mess of the first Christmas, God says, ‘Don’t worry – I’m not going to wait until you’ve got everything sorted out perfectly before I get involved with you. I’m already there for you in the middle of it all, and if you just let yourself lean on me a bit instead of trying to make yourself and everything around you perfect by your own efforts, everyone will feel a little more of my love flowing’.

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Pause for Thought, BBC Radio 2.

light, darkness and preferring the shadows

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The days begin to lengthen, and we look forward….

Our biggest shadow issue is not evil. It’s that we live small and adaptive lives. And Jung put it this way in a very homey metaphor. He said, we all walk in shoes too small for us. And I think that way of saying, all right, we had to learn early as children, the world’s big, and we’re not. The world’s powerful and we’re not, now, how are you going to survive a few decades with that?

And so the, the biggest shadow issue for us is how much fear governs our behaviors,…And how often we’re serving the sort of archaic messages from long ago and far away, which is walking down the street backwards. And, how seldom we step into the largeness of our own journey, because frankly it’s intimidating.

James Hollis

A Blessing around the Winter solstice

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Today, let this light bless you
With these friends let it bless you
With snow-scent and lavender bless you
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days

Jane Hirshfield, A Blessing for a Wedding

Without holding on

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Enjoying each moment to its fullness, without binding ourselves to how it is, or to our thoughts as to how it “should” be…

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.

He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

William Blake, Eternity

Inner peace

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Can we simply allow ourselves to feel happy, no matter what the changing circumstances in our life look like…

When we realize the everlasting truth

of “everything changes”

and find our composure in it,

we find ourselves in Nirvana.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen MInd, Beginners Mind