Category: Make the most of life

Let them pass through

Karl Duffy1 Comment

reflection

Spaciousness does not come by arriving at a state of mind where thoughts and emotions simply do not arise and disturb us. On the contrary, difficulties are part of life, and emotions connected to them will always arise. Rather it comes when we can hold such mental events in awareness in such a way that we do not give them, or the stories and dramas that make up our personality, the importance that they clamour for:

Yes, there is the purity of these autumn waters extending out to the horizon

But how does that compare with the haziness of the moon on a Spring night?

Most people want to have pure clarity

But sweep as you will, you cannot empty the mind

Keizan Jokin, the “Great Patriarch” 1268 – 1325, second founder of the Soto Zen School

Hearing the song

Karl Duffy2 Comments

river-glendalough

I spent the weekend in Glendalough and was able to walk in nature early in the morning among the trees and rivers. Some say even the rocks there vibrate with life. It was easy to feel grace and see wonder, just as we did as children.  So what we strive for in our working days – in the “chambers of commerce” –  is to remember that beauty and grace are never far from us. They are in the leaf, the stone, the heart.  If we listen,  there is wonder all around, and it sings. Can we hear it today?

What can I say that I have not said before? So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still

Mary Oliver,  What can I say?

Sunday Quote: Stilling the mind

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File:DUN AONGHASA FORT INIS MOR ARRAN ISLANDS IRELAND JULY 2013 (9212255198).jpg

I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying …

Pablo Neruda, It is Born

photo calflier001

 

When you get stuck behind a tractor

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:A traffic tail back behind a tractor by the former Coedana Rectory - geograph.org.uk - 1399270.jpg

It always happens when we are on the way to some appointment….trapped in our schedules, trapped in our cars…

Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn’t look out, they would make us live in cages too.

So we started noticing. Everything looked like cages. Your clothes fit like cages. Your houses looked like cages. You put your fences around your yards so they looked like cages. Everything was a cage. You turned the land into cages. Little squares. Then after you had all these cages you made a government to protect these cages. And that government was all cages. All laws about what you couldn’t do. The only freedom you had was inside your own cage. Then you wondered why you weren’t happy and didn’t feel free.

You made all the cages, then you wondered why you didn’t feel free.

Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder

photo eric jones

Sunday Quote: Desert moments

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File:Bare Ridges (2993439668).jpg

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

Annie Dillard

photo peter dowley

Endings are also beginnings

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File:Vaaggegordelde gordijnzwam (Cortinarius anomalus). Locatie, Hortus (Haren, Groningen).jpg

Become totally empty. Let your heart be at peace.

Amidst the rush of things coming and going,

observe how endings become beginnings.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

 To see beginnings and endings is a great support in difficult times. Early on, as I began to trust in the fiber of my being that nothing lasts, I became less afraid of pain. The fact that everything has an end comforted me. “One way or another,” I would say to myself, “this too will pass.” I was glad I saw that…the end of the day is the beginning of the night, and that a dead rose becomes compost for new growth….When I recognize the pain I feel as the legitimate result of loss, I am respectful of its presence and kind to myself. My mind always relaxes when it is kind, and around the edges of the truth of whatever has ended, I see displays of what might be beginning.

Sylvia Boorstein

photo dominicus johannes bergsma