The world around us would be desolate
except for the world within us
Wallace Stevens, from The Snow Man
phot Kor!An
Category: Make the most of life
Moment by moment
Suppose a king might hear the sound of a lute and say “What is that sound – so delightful, so tantalizing, so intoxicating, so ravishing, so enthralling?” They would say “That, sire is called a lute…” Then he would say “Go and fetch me the lute” They would fetch the lute but he then said “Enough of the lute. Fetch me just the sound”.
They had to explain that the sound could not exist independently, but was created by the separate strings, box and arch, all elements working simultaneously.
Just as the king could not find the sound of the lute, so we cannot find our self. When we investigate, any thoughts of ‘me’ or ‘mine’ or ‘I am’ do not occur.
Based on the Buddha, Vina Sutta
The intelligence of nature
How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing – each stone, blossom, child – is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things teach us: to fall,
patiently trusting our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, II, 16
The right attitude
This is the real secret of life
to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.
And instead of calling it work, realize it is play
Alan Watts
photo vatobob
Seeing the magic today
The world is full of magic things
patiently waiting for our senses to get sharper
wb Yeats
Darkness and light
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious
Jung
Today is Lá Féile Bríde, St. Brigid’s Day, celebrated on the ancient Celtic festival of Imbolc, a word meaning perhaps “in the womb”, and linked with the feminine, fertility and the birth of lambs. The Celts were much more in touch with the rhythms of nature and with symbols than we are, and so lit fires in the darkness to mark the fact that they had arrived at the midway point between the winter and the spring solstice. They celebrated the lengthening days and the early signs of Spring, in a declaration of trust that the darkness of winter was not going to last. It was the start of a period of planting and birth: a time for looking forward and beginning again. For us too, some form of death and rebirth is always happening in our inner selves, even if we are unaware of it. We are never really in just one place, but always somewhat in-between, re-working our own myths and adding depth and meaning to our journey.
For last year’s words
belong to last year’s language
and next year’s words
await another voice.
And to make an end
is to make a beginning
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
Mindfulbalance 