Predicament

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Two quotes from Leonard Cohen on the anniversary of his death

One idea on my new record is that the human predicament has no solution. We were tossed out of the garden; this isn’t paradise. And to look for perfect solutions is a very difficult burden to bear. That’s my theme: It’s a mess — thank God

[“The Traitor”]  was about the feeling that we have of betraying some mission that we were mandated to fulfill, and being unable to fulfill it. And then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it, and that the deeper courage was to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you found yourself.

 

Simplify

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I want to learn how to walk down the ladder gracefully. 

I have this image – I would like to get smaller and smaller in a relevant way.

Carly Simon, on what she learned from dealing with cancer and other life setbacks, quoted in Sara Davidson, The First Day of the Rest of My Life

Nothing is fixed

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We frequently identify quite closely with our moods…never the best idea on a Monday morning….

In a world where nothing is as fixed as it seems,

it comes as a great relief to discover that even the ego is impermanent

Mark Epstein, Advice not Given: A Guide to Getting over Yourself

Sunday Quote: No need to want more

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The beauty of a mountain is that it is so much like a mountain, and of water that it is so much like water

Zen saying

Darker Days

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Every year we have been witness to it: how the world descends into a rich mash, in order that it may resume. And therefore who would cry out

to the petals on the ground to stay, knowing, as we must, how the vivacity of what was,  is married

to the vitality of what will be? I don’t say it’s easy, but what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world be true? So let us go on

though the sun be swinging east, and the ponds be cold and black, and the sweets of the year be doomed.

Mary Oliver, Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness

Always being born, always dying

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To regress in a certain way is to return to origins, to step back from the battle line of existence, to remember the gods and spirits and elements of nature, including your own pristine nature, the person you were at the beginning. You return to the womb of imagination so that your pregnancy can recycle. You are always being born, always dying to the day to find the restorative waters of night. Darkness is natural, one of the life processes. There may be some promise, the mere suggestion that life is going forward, even though you have no sense of where you are headed. It’s a time of waiting and trusting. My attitude as a therapist in these situations is not to be anxious for a conclusion or even understanding.

You have to sit with these things and in due time let them be revealed for what they are.

Thomas Moore, The Dark Night of the Soul