The future enters into us,
in order to transform itself in us,
long before it happens.
Rilke
Sunday Quote: transformation
Month: March 2024
The in-between space
You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.
The path you took to get here has washed out; the way forward is still concealed from you.
“The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.”
You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk, your eyes are blurred; and there is no mirror.
Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust; You know you have to make your own way through.
As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free from all you have outgrown.
What is being transfigured here is your mind, and it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become for your arrival in the new dawn.
John O’Donohue, “For the Interim Time” in Benedictus: A Book of Blessings
Love and wholeness
In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety – in fact, most neuroses and compulsions – are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition.
We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light.
Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.
Marion Woodman, Jungian author and poet, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
Called to let go
Where is this peace to be found? The answer is clear. In weakness. First of all, in our own weakness, in those places of our hearts where we feel most broken, most insecure, most in agony, most afraid. Why there? Because there, our familiar ways of controlling our world are being stripped away; there we are called to let go from doing much, thinking much, and relying on our self-sufficiency. Right there where we are weakest the peace which is not of this world is hidden.
Henri Nouwen
Where wisdom arises
When a person remains focused on the inconstancy of everything that comes together,
ignorance is abandoned,
and clear knowing [wisdom] arises.
The Buddha, Itivuttaka: The Group of Threes, Iti 3.36;
Blessed
Even with all our technological accomplishments and urban sophistication, we consider ourselves blessed, healed in some manner, forgiven, and for a moment transported into some other world, when we catch a passing glimpse of an animal in the wild: a deer in some woodland, a fox crossing a field, a butterfly in its dancing flight southward to its wintering region, a hawk soaring in the distant sky.
Thomas Berry : Sunbeams, January 2021
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