Sunday Quote: Giving room

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Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.

Pema Chodron

It always comes.

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Living without contention, we are well-rooted in the earth.  Zen poets say we become a mature bamboo – steady at the base, flexible in strong winds, and responsive to the movement of life.  The strength of non-contentiousness brings patience and trust.  The poet Rilke reminds us,

“Being fully alive means not numbering or counting,

but ripening like a tree which doesn’t force its sap and stands confidently in the storms of winter

not afraid that summer might not come. 

It does come. It always comes.”

Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart

Everything changes

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Everything is changing, including you.
That is an actual fact you can see.
This is not something you will know after reading many books.
So if you have a lot of suffering in your everyday life,
you will actually feel the most important teaching of Buddhism:
that everything changes, and there is nothing to stick to.

from the great Shunryu Suzuki roshi

Disconnected

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When feeling stuck or disconnected from the miracle of life, as will happen to us all, try to listen, see, feel, and just take in. In order to be whole, suspend your criticism. For life is not a matter of taste, but of awakening, not a matter of finding things pleasing or disturbing, but of finding things completing, not a matter of liking or disliking, but of opening to the geography of one’s soul

Mark Nepo

Again and again

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Each person becomes a wanderer again and again in the course of life, as we find our true self by becoming lost. Each person carries a “story that could be true.” Each crossroad in life secretly asks the question: Who are you really?

 Michael Meade, 1944 –  American author and mythologist.

Some light

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In the Christian Calendar today is the feast of Candlemas. While not as old as the Celtic feast of yesterday, it does date from the 4th Century in Jerusalem, and reflects the same need to mark this moment, halfway between the winter and the spring solstices. It brought light into the darkness – in the Celtic tradition by the lighting of fires, in the Christian by a procession of candles and the blessing of candles for use in the home.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Mary Oliver, The Ponds (extract)