New life is sometimes related to shedding of the old self. Struggles can strip away the surface layers of our lives. Growth often requires releasing old identities or expectations. Hardship can be alchemical.
Without the bitterest cold
that penetrates to the very bone,
how can plum blossoms spill forth their fragrance all over the world?
Dōgen Zenji, 1200 -1250
A rock and a flower are both worn by time
The rock is eroded, the flower unfolds.
One is broken down, the other breaks open
How will you meet your days?
Will you let them wear you away, or will you let them split you wide so that your color spills
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
The meditative perspective allows us to experience the self not as something static,
but as a process that can tolerate falling apart and coming back together.
Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart
Every moment offers a choice: cling to the mind’s chatter or relax into the present.
When you stop labelling experiences as “good” or “bad” and simply let life move through you, the weight of resistance lifts.
What remains is a quiet, unshakable joy – the silent hum of existence itself.
This is the bliss of being, always accessible beneath the noise of the self.
Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul
On Palm Sunday.
On the outskirts of Jerusalem
the donkey waited.
Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,
he stood and waited.
How hard, yet how absurdly easy, it is
to bless instead of curse.
If God appeared at the side of the road,
tired and dusty, and asked,
Would you lend me your donkey,
would you say yes?
Mary Oliver, The Poet Thinks About the Donkey [extract]
Most wisdom traditions hold two insights. The first is that change comes slowly, gradually, through practice, learning to sit and “go slowly” as Anthony learned in the desert. However there are also teaching of insights and conversion coming in a moment, through hearing a word as in Anthony’s case – and frequently in the Zen tradition – or in seeing something, as in this text. In a moment we get a direct experience of the fact we are two things at once and consciousness is transformed:
The first time I saw Brother Lawrence was upon the 3rd of August, 1666. He told me …of his conversion at the age of eighteen.
It was winter, and he saw a tree stripped of its leaves and yet knew that within a little time the leaves would be come again and after that the flowers and then the fruit would appear. In that moment, he got a sense of the care and power of God, an inner awareness which has never since left him.
This sense had given him such freedom and kindled in him such a love… that he could not tell whether it had increased in the forty years since it had happened.
Brother Lawrence, 1693, The Practice of the Presence of God
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