Category: Make the most of life

The light is everything

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The weekend, which allows the possibility to get out in nature, is a good time to share some of Mary Oliver’s poetry.  This one is about flowers and how some are less “perfect” than others. But it is also about  relationships and what hopes we have for our heart, about a greater beauty that embraces the clearly imperfect and allows us cast away the hassles of the everyday which are not us. We are nourished.

Shared moments, flowers, meanings and the stories that feed us.

What in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided–
and that one wears an orange blight–
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away–
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Mary Oliver, The Ponds

Forgiving our life

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

A lot of us find it hard to extend real kindness towards ourselves. Our default position is that we are much more critical of ourselves – and how our life history has developed – than we are of others. 

And if we forgive life for not being what we told it to be, or expected, or wished, or longed for it to be,

we forgive ourselves for not being what we might have been also.

And then we can be what we are, which is boundless

John Tarrant, The Zenosaurus Course in Koans

Another week begins: it doesn’t have to be perfect

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Sometimes Monday mornings can be a challenge, and what is not going right comes to mind more easily, as we start back into work after a relaxed and sunny Sunday.  So we remind ourselves that  one does not have to be completely satisfied with everything before one can be content. Similarly, everything does not have to be just as you would like it in your life for you to be grateful.

Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have.

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape

The wilderness constantly reminds me that wholeness is not about perfection….

I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds. Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness – mine, yours, ours – need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.

Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

Sometimes an empty space is the best response

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Sometimes peoples words and actions can agitate and upset us.

We wish to react or maybe get fearful and withdraw.

However, sometimes doing nothing, not reacting or rushing to a definitive judgment, can be the wisest course.

Hold a space. Emptiness and form. Non-doing and doing.

Thirty spokes meet in the hub.
But its where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.

Hollowed out, the clay makes a pot.
Where the clay is not
is where it’s useful.

Cut doors and windows to make a room.
Where the room is not,
there is room for you.

So something is shaped into what is;
but its usefulness comes from what is not.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

A spirit of adventure

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Not a bad attitude to have as we start the day, seeing moments – even difficult ones – as “adventures” .

Wish that your journey be a long one, 

full of adventures, full of knowing.

(Vα εύχεσαι να είναι μακρύς ο δρόμος, γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις)

Cavafy’s advice to Odysseus before he set out on his voyage back to Ithaca

Light which gives meaning

Karl Duffy4 Comments

When you possess light within, you see it externally.     

Anais Nin

Today is the Summer Solstice, the northern hemisphere’s longest day –  the official start of Summer  – when the longer days of sunlight follow. Unusually for Ireland we are actually forecast a day of very warm sunshine. Traditionally,  cultures knew the significance of this date and marked it by the lighting of bonfires. It reminds us that we are at a midpoint of the year, which hints at every midpoint on a journey.  Life is short and there are many challenges each day.  However, we choose how to use time, bringing the light of beauty to each moment, long or short

We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender.

Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible.

Awakening and surrender: they  frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.

John O’Donohue.
photo SK