Category: Make the most of life

A Dark Night

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The classic story of the night journey is the Biblical tale of Jonah. …Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and nights before it spewed him up on land. In your dark night you may have a sensation you could call “oceanic” – being in the sea, at sea, or immersed in the waters of the womb. The sea is the vast potential of life, but it is also your dark night, which may force you to surrender some knowledge you have achieved….

…to regress in a certain way is to return to origins….. You return to the womb of imagination so that your pregnancy can recycle. You are always being born, always dying to the day to find the restorative waters of night. In the dark night something of your makeup comes to an end – your ego, your self, your creativeness, your meaning. You may find in that darkness a key to your source, the larger soul that makes you who you are and holds the secrets of your existence. It is not enough to rely on the brilliance of your learning and intellect. You have to give yourself receptively to the transforming natural powers that remain mysteriously dark.

Being shaped by your darkness, like Jonah, you become the sun rising out of the night water. You are always being reborn, always slipping back into the sea. Your dark night may feel stagnant and unrhythmical, but it has its subtle movements. The movement in your darkness may be difficult to sense, but it may be present nonetheless. You may not be advancing, but you are in quiet motion. There you are, suffering your fate, stuck in some container that keeps your precious life at bay, and there you have a special beauty, a pulse that can be felt only in the dark.

Thomas Moore Dark Nights of the Soul

Work

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Connectedness is another hallmark of the soul. Its important in our work not only to be excited about being successful and making money, but also deeply concerned about the value of what we’re doing and having a stake in the outcome of the product. If you can take romanticism and sentimentality out of the word, you can say that it is necessary to love what we’re doing and what we’re making. People who are frustrated with their work often say they simply don’t love what they’re doing and therefore feel unmotivated to get to work. Love is the impetus that propels us toward our life work.

Thomas Moore, A Life at Work

Weather

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What is up with the weather this week? Just one week ago one could not sleep with the heat and had to open windows to let some air in. This week people are talking about turning the heating back on. Wet and windy, even cold, more like late autumn than the summer of last week.

It points to a useful teaching. It alerts us to the natural tendency to try and hold on to. and make permanent, things that are going well. However, the only real reality is change. It is our basic instinct to search for happiness. And we can often think that a certain set of circumstances are necessary to achieve it. But then we find that the circumstances change. People change. Commitments change. It reinforces the basic truth that we face every time we sit: things arise and pass away.

Every time we have an experience that brings us face to face with the reality of impermanence, such as when someone moves away, we lose something we care about, or we hear something that changes completely our understanding of a situation, it is good that we take time to reflect on it, and on the way change happens in our life. The more we do that the more we find we are able to let things go. Everything is in transformation. When we can see that with a calm mind, and with an attitude of kindness, we can accept that change is inevitable, and move forward in peace. We can let go of last week and accept this week as it is.

Of course we all know that things change, that nothing endures. No one I know likes to go to the dentist, but everyone goes, more or less relaxed, even for complicated procedures. No one would go at all if appointments were open-ended, with no expectations of when, or even if, we would emerge. We remember things change when we go to the dentist, but we forget when we are confused. Grief confuses us, and loss and sadness frightens us. If we can keep at least a bit of the mind clear about temporality, we can manage complicated , even difficult, times with grace.

Sylvia Boorstein,
It’s Easier Than You Think – The Buddhist Way to Happiness

Not wanting to live

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We can easily forgive a child
who is afraid of the dark;
the real tragedy of life
is when men are afraid of the light.

Plato

How to grow

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We become whole
through relationships
and through letting go
of relationships

Freud

Ants

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The other day I threw out into the garden the end of a pear I had eaten. I had hoped that it would be food for the songthrush and blackbird who visit. However, a few minutes later I noticed that it had been discovered by ants, who were working incredibly fast to extract its goodness and bring it back to the nest. In a straight line they worked quickly, back and forth, organized, one following the trail left by the last, with one purpose, focused on a clear goal.

This dull Sunday morning I can reflect on direction and purpose. My Sunday roots are in Catholicism. When I was young we dressed in our best clothes which were all laid out in preparation on the night before. Saturday night was the time to polish shoes, so that there was a heightened sense of ritual and specialness about going to Church on the Sunday morning. It was a place set apart. It anchored the week and was clearly the moment which gave meaning to it. In my young eyes it was a place of certainty and continuity, an outer form that was bigger than me and gave the impression of being a container where all of life’s questions could be answered and complexities resolved.

However, despite such clarity when little and despite having invested all the years since to developing the inner life in different ways, I cannot say that life has become more certain. Ants can move consistently in a straight line. As a young adult I felt that my life plan moved in the same way. However, I see now that such a need for straight lines and a definite script came from anxiety and has been replaced by trust. Life is complex and I have moved, and continue to move, in more meandering ways. What I have come to realize, is that in spite of those seeming changes in direction and complexity of experiences, whatever meaning there is to be found comes to me slowly, sometimes unexpectedly, and I am content with that.

I am dressed more casually this Sunday morning, but it is no less special because of that. Meaning can be found inside and in the ordinary. It is not necessary to always be as busy as the ant to find direction. One does not have to know the end point on the map to be going in the right way.