Category: Make the most of life

Accompanying

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Dog hitches a ride on bicycler in Japan.jpg

‘Compassion’, when literally translated,  means ‘ suffering with others’ and ‘with’ is the most important word, because it implies belonging. ‘Companion’ is ‘one who travels with another’.  So in this relationship there is no guide, there is no healer and no one healed; we simply accompany one another.

 As we inquire into the heart of service, we see a pattern: common to all habits that hinder us in our work is a sense of separateness; and common to all those moments and actions that truly seem to serve is the experience of unity.  As my friend Reb Anderson says, “We are simply walking through birth and death holding hands.”

Frank Ostaseski

photo takato marui

Space for gratitude

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Brave person walking out on the glacier point ledge.jpg

Then there was Jim, who said that for many years he took walks that were ‘ranting’ walks. He would walk and contemplate all the things that angered him about the world. One day he decided to begin taking ‘gratitude’ walks. ‘Now while I walk I recount all the things I am grateful for in my life and don’t allow myself to think of negative things at all. I have found this simple practice to be a great gift.’

John Izzo, The Five Secrets you must Discover before Your Die

A deeper source

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:There's still life in this old tree - geograph.org.uk - 1039441.jpg

Maybe you are searching among the branches

for what only appears in the roots

Rumi

 photo evelyn simak

Half Circles

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Day moon (16669185823).jpg

These last few months I have come to see more and more how some sense of longing seems to be a part and parcel of human nature, and will never go away. It comes from the fact, as John O’Donohue wrote in Anam Chara, that the human person is a “threshold where many infinities meet”. This can explain why, for many of us, a sense of wonder can exist in a world which is finite:

The human being is an in-between presence, belonging neither fully to the earth from which she has come, nor to the heavens toward which her mind and spirit aim….The creator of the universe loves circles: time and space are circles, the day is a circle, the year is a circle, the earth is a circle. But when creating and fashioning the human heart, the creator only created a half-circle, so that there is something ontologically unfinished in human nature. That is why you can’t enter your own life or inhabit your full presence without a vital and real relationship with some other person.

John O Donohue, The Presence of Compassion

photo hedera baltica

Not fixing into right or wrong

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

cr-two-paths-diverged-in-a-wood-and-iCompassionate action starts with seeing yourself

when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong.

At that point, you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those,

a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.

Pema Chodron

What really satisfies

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:An exemple of Fangorn Tree.jpg

What is it that I want? Not money,
Not a large desk, not a house with ten rooms.
This is what I want to do: to sit here,
To take no part, to be called away by the wind…

Robert Bly, The Call Away

photo Glendalough by neutralgrey