Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile.
Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.
David Whyte
Category: Make the most of life
Learning from nature in time of stress
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry, The Peace Of Wild Things
More on eyes being opened.
The present moment, like the spotted owl or the sea turtle, has become an endangered species. Yet more and more I find that dwelling in the present moment, in the face of everything that would call us out of it, is our highest spiritual discipline. More boldly, I would say that our very presentness is our salvation; the present moment, entered into fully, is our gateway to eternal life.
Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall
Contemplation is related to art, to worship, to charity: all these reach out by intuition and self-dedication into the realms that transcend the material conduct of everyday life. Or rather, in the midst of ordinary life itself they seek and find a new and transcendent meaning. And by this meaning, they transfigure the whole of life.
Thomas Merton.
Allowing ourselves be surprised …
In this poem e.e Cummings pushes the English language in an attempt to capture the life he feels, so much so that the words almost seem to have difficulty fitting in. He sees the vibrancy of growth and life all around in nature and expresses this in lines which rush from one into the next. The last two lines well express the richness that we feel when we start to pay greater attention to all the things which surround us each day.
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e.e.cummings
Sunday Quote: Joy
If you start looking at life with joy,
sadness starts disappearing.
You cannot have heaven and hell together,
you can have only one.
It is your choice.
Osho
Trusting even when we cannot see
Both winter and spring are part of what’s true as are summer and autumn in their turn. In welcoming awakening’s seasonal transformations, we discover a greater truth that shows us a new way of trusting the very change that we once thought a problem. Awakening has its ebbs and flows. People get discouraged when nothing seems to be happening in their spiritual life. But because something isn’t apparent in our conscious awareness doesn’t mean that it’s not happening at all. When the field appears fallow, we can learn to trust what’s going on underground, in the dark, invisible to us. In fact, it’s essential that along with the lightning comes the quiet dark, when radiant bursts are taken in and made part of the whole. To agree to all the seasons and tides of awakening means that we are always walking the Way: while there are times we won’t understand, there are no detours, no causes for disappointment. Thouhg sometimes obscured by clouds, there is only the rising dawn, long and slow, that we walk within.
Joan Sutherland, Seasons of Awakening
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