A slip of light stays

Even in the dark of winter we get reminders of colour and light

Three times my life has opened.
Once, into darkness and rain.
Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and
starts to remember each time it enters the act of love.
Once, to the fire that holds all.

These three were not different.
You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.


But outside my window all day a maple has stepped
from her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping
the colored silks.
Neither are we different in what we know.
There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of
light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,
or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

Jane Hirshfield, The Lives of the Heart: Poems

Not wasting a day

Continuous practice, day after day, is the most appropriate way of expressing gratitude.

This means that you practice continuously, without wasting a single day of your life, without using it for your own sake.

Why is it so? Your life is a fortunate outcome of the continuous practice of the past. You should express your gratitude immediately.

Dogen quoted in Kazuaki Tanahashi,  Enlightenment Unfolds Kazuaki Tanahashi

A choice

Past and present join

in the winter solstice.

The days will stretch and we survive.

with losses, yes, and lessons too

to reap the honey of the hive

of history. The yield of what is given

insists a choice – to live; to thrive

Peter Fallon, 1951 – Irish Poet, A Winter Solstice

Darkness and light

Waiting, watching, trusting…what people have done at this time of year since the beginning of time. These universal themes, rooted in nature, speak to the heart all through the year

Hope begins in the dark,

the stubborn hope that if you just show up

and try to do the right thing,

the dawn will come.

You wait and watch and work:

you don’t give up.

Anne Lamott

An important guest

Waiting presents an enormous challenge.

We are impatient, I-can-fix-it kinds of people . . . but not all situations can be fixed. We assume that everything in life can be made better by taking action, but sometimes it just isn’t so. We shrink when we are presented with situations where action does no good at all. We deplore the passivity of waiting. Yet waiting is an enormous opportunity if we regard it as a wise teacher. Waiting offers us a great deal when we choose to learn.

Waiting is an important guest to honor in the guest house of our humanity. If we consciously allow waiting to be our teacher, we can accommodate waiting more peacefully. If we welcome waiting as a spiritual discipline, waiting will present its spiritual gifts. Waiting contains some of our richest spiritual opportunities if we are conscious enough and courageous enough to name them and live into them.

Holly Whitcomb, The Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting

Sunday Quote: Only if

I’ll just
     tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
     ever, possibly, see one.

Mary Oliver, The World I live in

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