Even in beautiful places, we all have to be with different kinds of limitations: we look for an ideal life, but even in nature not every fruit is perfect in shape or colour:
I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do
was to show up for my life
and not be ashamed.
Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year
Sometimes unexpected winds blow. It is best to find strength within oneself at moments like this:
You too are a tree. During a storm of emotions, you should not stay at the level of the head or the heart, which are like the top of the tree. You have to leave the heart, the eye of the storm, and come back to the trunk of the tree. Your trunk is one centimeter below your navel. Focus there, paying attention only to the movement of your abdomen, and continue to breathe.
Thích Nhat Hạnh
Express yourself completely, then keep quiet.
Strong winds do not last all morning,
And the heavy rains do not last all day.
What causes them?
Heaven and Earth.
If Heaven and Earth cannot make things last forever,
How can we?
Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching
In Ireland we love talking about the weather, especially over a Bank Holiday weekend, as if Nature should have known to provided sunshine for our few days. Sometimes it can be a way of avoiding conversations with a real connection, but it can be a way of working with something which is always changing, in a country that has four seasons in an hour.
I never read weather forecasts. As soon as I read one, tomorrow is clouded for me, even if it is sunshine that’s predicted. A part of me is making plans, or second-guessing the heavens; a part of me is saying, “I should be able to get in a second walk tomorrow, though by Sunday night it’s going to be cold again.” When it turns out different, as it often will, all my thinking is in vain.
It isn’t that weather forecasts mess with my mind. It’s that the mind is so ready to mess with everything it touches — to make theories around it, to draw fanciful conclusions from it, to play distorting games of projection and miscalculation — that even the elements are not safe from it. It has a supreme gift, I’ve found, for complicating the simple and muddying what could and should be transparent. It can take the tiniest detail and turn it into a drama or a universe of needless speculation. Most times I dread a coming moment, the moment never comes. It’s not the world that I need to change, I see, but the mayhem that my overactive mind makes of the world.
Pico Iyer, The Folly of the Weather Forecast
A quiet Sunday in a long weekend, with some gone away or starting holidays. When we stop running we come to see what really matters
What in your life is Calling you,
When all the noise is silenced,
The meetings adjourned..
The lists laid aside,
And the Wild Iris blooms
By itself
In the dark forest…
What still pulls on your Soul?
Rumi
I’ve always had the feeling that life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you, give you experiences. They may not all be that pleasant, but nobody promised you a rose garden. But more than likely if you do dare, what you get are the marvelous returns. Courage is probably the most important of the virtues, because without courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues, you can’t say against a murderous society, I oppose your murdering. You got to have courage to do so. I seem to have known that a long time and found great joy in it.
Maya Angelou, in Judith Rich, Conversations with Maya Angelou
