Category: Be fully present

The weather forecast

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In Ireland we love talking about the weather, especially over a Bank Holiday weekend, as if Nature should have known to provided sunshine for our few days. Sometimes it can be a way of avoiding conversations with a real connection, but it can be a way of working with something which is always changing, in a country that has four seasons in an hour.

I never read weather forecasts. As soon as I read one, tomorrow is clouded for me, even if it is sunshine that’s predicted. A part of me is making plans, or second-guessing the heavens; a part of me is saying, “I should be able to get in a second walk tomorrow, though by Sunday night it’s going to be cold again.” When it turns out different, as it often will, all my thinking is in vain. 

It isn’t that weather forecasts mess with my mind. It’s that the mind is so ready to mess with everything it touches — to make theories around it, to draw fanciful conclusions from it, to play distorting games of projection and miscalculation — that even the elements are not safe from it. It has a supreme gift, I’ve found, for complicating the simple and muddying what could and should be transparent. It can take the tiniest detail and turn it into a drama or a universe of needless speculation. Most times I dread a coming moment, the moment never comes. It’s not the world that I need to change, I see, but the mayhem that my overactive mind makes of the world.

Pico Iyer, The Folly of the Weather Forecast

 

Keeping a place for music

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We should not try to tame our hearts or become too focused on the to-do lists of our days:

Wild sings the bird of the heart

in the forests of our lives.

Mary Oliver

Little moments of wonder in a day

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Even brief,  five minute,  encounters –  if we have eyes to see –  can contain a lifetime, and make a day special

Unexpected wonders happen,

not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen,

but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.

Wendell Berry

The need for sanctuary

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Sanctuary is wherever I find safe space to regain my bearings, reclaim my soul, heal my wounds, and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the storm: it’s about spiritual survival. Today, seeking sanctuary is no more optional for me than church attendance was as a child.

 Sometimes I find it in churches, monasteries, and other sites designated as sacred.

But more often I find it in places sacred to my soul: in the natural world, in the company of a trustworthy friend, in solitary or shared silence, in the ambience of a good poem or good music.

Parker Palmer, Seeking Sanctuary in our own Sacred Places

Sunday Quote: Acceptance: this is how it is

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The earth always accepts what the sky throws down.

African Proverb

The heart

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File:The park bench (2669222928).jpg

The heart is quiet rather than noisy, intuitive rather than deductive,

lives entirely in the present moment and is at every moment accepting of reality as it is.

Moreover, the heart does not seek to distance itself from, or dominate anything or anyone by labeling. It accepts rather than rejects, finding similarity rather than alienation and likeness rather than difference.

Your heart knows no fear, it experiences no desire, and never finds the need to defend or justify itself. It is patient and undemanding. It nourishes our bodies in every moment.

Little wonder then, that the mind –  always impatient and very demanding – manages to dominant the heart so thoroughly.

Archimandrite Meletios Webber

photo rosino