Category: Be fully present

Everything moves on

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The autumn equinox arrives at 9:54 PM on Saturday, September 22, officially marking the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere…..

Another year gone, leaving everywhere its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

– the uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing to stay — how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever in these momentary pastures

Mary Oliver, Fall Song

Like a leaf

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When I rise up

Let me rise up joyful

like a bird.

When I fall

Let me fall without

regret

like a leaf

Wendell Berry, Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer

Comings and goings

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Become totally empty.

Let your heart be at peace.

Amidst the rush of worldly comings and goings,

observe how endings become beginnings.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 16

Empty

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Very windy these days,  as first the tail end of the tropical storm passed over the country, and this morning Storm Ali shakes things up.

The first of the leaves start to fall.

The Heart Sutra says, “all phenomena in their own-being are empty.” “Own-being” means separate,  independent existence… everything is a tentative expression of one seamless, ever-changing landscape. So no individual person or thing has any permanent, fixed identity. 

Lewis Redmond, Emptiness: The Most Misunderstood Word in Buddhism

It will never be perfect

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Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

Leonard Cohen,  Anthem

In 1992 he commented on the lines: 

We’ve forgotten the central myth of our culture which is the expulsion from the garden of Eden. This situation does not admit of solution of perfection. This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country. The thing is imperfect.

There is a crack in everything that you can put together: Physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation with the broken-ness of things.

Never enough

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Everyone wants you to be Atlas,
to shoulder it all. Even the voice in your
head insists you are behind. But I’ve seen
the light in you, the one the gods finger
while we sleep. I’ve seen the blossom open
in your heart, no matter what remains to
be done. There are never enough hours
to satisfy the minions of want. So close
your eyes and lean into the Oneness that
asks nothing of you…. You have never been more
complete than in this incomplete moment.

Mark Nepo, The Myth of Urgency