Do not worry if all the candles in the world flicker and die
we have the spark that starts the fire.
Rumi
The spark
Month: December 2024
a still heart
In the still heart
that refuses nothing,
the world is twice born.
Jane Hirshfield
Serene
Before the universe was born.
there was something formless and perfect
It is serene. Empty.
Solitary. Unchanging.
Infinite. Eternally present.
It is the mother of the ten thousand things.
For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 25
Sunday Quote: The secret
Those who are willing to be vulnerable
move among mysteries
Theodore Roethke, American Poet, Straw for the Fire
A living myth
The Winter Solstice – a day which held great spiritual and mythic significance for people down through the ages. All over the Northern Hemisphere, ancient festivals marked this, the shortest day of the year. The word in Irish – Grianstad – means the stopping of the sun, a pause in the battle between darkness and light, where light eventually triumphs.
Jung realized that the problems of our time are rooted …above all in the loss of a living myth which would give meaning to our lives.
He saw that the dissociation of the conscious ego from what he called the primordial or instinctual soul presented a growing and unperceived danger to humanity. The more we emphasized reason and the supremacy of the rational mind, the greater the danger that instinct — whose power we have failed to acknowledge or understand — would drive, possess, delude and overwhelm us and the more we would fall victim to secular and religious ideologies and utopian goals which could ultimately lead us to destroy ourselves.
The paramount goal we need to focus on is reconnecting our conscious mind with the deeper dimension of the soul.
Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul
The end of a work year: Let it unravel
[When] you get to the end of a meeting, a day, let that unravel. You cultivate the wisdom of no-performance and no-result. You listen to any judgements that are rattling in your mind, establish mindfulness on the mind-state and its feeling, then let the defenses and identities go.
It’s a matter of acknowledging the inner helicopter that is hovering over ‘If only this’ and ‘I should have said that’ and ‘How dare they do this!’ and steadily touching the ground. Allow the feeling to be felt and breathe through it. Let it end, even let the wish that it all end come to an end. When the rotor blades stop, just here, on the other side of failure, is purity and release.
Ajahn Sucitto, Happy Deathday
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