Category: Make the most of life

….into the nature of things

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Eyes to see

In our meditation and insightful understanding of the way things are, we see that beauty, refinement, pleasure are impermanent conditions — as well as pain, misery and ugliness. If you really understand that, then you can enjoy and endure whatever happens to you. Actually, much of the lesson in life is learning to endure what we don’t like in ourselves and in the world around us; being able to be patient and kindly, and not make a scene over the imperfections in the sensory experience. We can adapt and endure and accept the changing characteristics of the sensory birth and death cycle by letting go and no longer attaching to it. When we free ourselves from identity with it, we experience our true nature, which is bright, clear, knowing; but is not a personal thing anymore, it is not ’me’ or ‘mine’.

Ajahn Sumedho, Mindfulness, the Path to the Deathless

Sunday quote: Seeing deeper….

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:Depth in the arch.jpg

People are in every way prevented from getting inside themselves.

Our greatest problem is a fear of depth

Thomas Merton

photo anjali.verma999

Balance in nature and in life

Karl Duffy3 Comments

dawn light2

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity

Jung.

Time moves on

Karl Duffy1 Comment

dawn Jan 1

There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night.

John O’Donohue

Identity and small protective stories

Karl Duffy1 Comment

depth oceanThe task is to shift the identity more toward the movable conversation that stands behind us, a deep undercurrent we can tap into that carries on unconcerned with the surface tribulations. In this depth we try to create a real silence in which to keep our long-standing, well-established, self-protective stories away, to let ourselves alone so we can experience the physical vulnerability of the question and be transformed by it. We give these smaller protective stories away so that we can see how they come back to us once we have established a larger way of being in the world.

David Whyte, The Three Marriages

Hidden growth

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Bee Holme in autumn mist - geograph.org.uk - 761379.jpg

A lovely misty morning here in Kildare, and the leaves are clearly starting to fall.  Autumn is the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” as Keats said in his beautiful description.   The seeds fall underground and move into a period of silent growth. We can learn from them how to trust and wait,  in times which are dark or when nothing seems to be happening.

I gratefully acknowledge how darkness has become less of an enemy for me and more of a place of silent nurturance, where the slow, steady gestation needed for my soul’s growth can occur. Not only is light a welcomed part of my life, but I am also developing a greater understanding of how much I need to befriend my inner darkness.

Joyce Rupp, Little Pieces of Light

photo phil champion