This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds,
Watching the birth and death of beings is like looking at movements of a dance,
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.
The Buddha, Lalitavistara Sutra, 13.79
“I’ve known rivers,” writes Langston Hughes. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers“.
Am I going to flow with my river nature today, or am I going to swim against it? this is what I ask myself when I get out of bed each morning. And when I go to sleep, I apologize to the river gods for any hard strokes I made against the current, and for splashing about like a drowning person. I pray that tomorrow I may once again know the pleasure of following my soul downstream, because I’ve known rivers- and once we’ve known rivers, once we have stretched out on the dark waters, trusting the river gods, going in the direction of life even if it is headfirst toward the rapids – we want to taste that water again;
we want our souls to grow deep like the rivers again.
Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How difficult times can help us grow
You continually get the teachings that you need in order to open your heart.
To the degree that you didn’t understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you’re given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to learn how to open further.
Pema Chodron
To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.
Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
I worried a lot.
Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
Mary Oliver, I Worried
“Seasons” is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think.
It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all — and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.
Parker Palmer, From Language to Life
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