Tag: Autumn

Its own gifts

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Enjoy each season of your life. Patiently prepare the soil, sow the seeds, and do the work, and you’ll harvest the abundant fruits of your labors. Accept both good fortune and adversity as you accept the shifting seasons. Enjoy the glazed beauty of a winter’s day and the sultry days of summer, for soon enough, each season, each day, each moment, passes into history, and its exact likeness shall not be seen again. So rather than longing for summer in the midst of a winter’s chill, or wishing for cool winds in the dog days of summer, embrace each season for its own gifts. Align yourself with the cycles of time and transformation, riding change as ships ride the waves.

Dan Millman, The Laws of Spirit

Let it fall

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Fear not the pain.

Let its weight fall back into the earth;

for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown

too heavy. You cannot bring them along.

Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Rilke

Sunday Quote: the winds of life

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Monks, eight worldly winds spin after the world, and the world spins after these eight winds: Gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. These are the eight worldly conditions that spin after the world, and the world spins after these eight worldly conditions.

The Buddha, Lokavipatti Sutta

A falling leaf does not hate the wind

Lin Yutang, 1895 – 1976, Chinese philosopher, linguist, novelist, and translator.

Sunday Quote: Moment by moment

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The first of the leaves are beginning to fall…

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it,

but to enable it.


Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Incubation periods

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Our psyches, like nature, need periods of rest and regeneration. Some overly positive psychological models have no place for the dips in mood or energy that are a normal part of life and which can be seen in the cycles of nature. We have to learn to not fear those moments when we do not feel completely in control, or when lose our sense of direction for a while.

There are moments in human life when a new page is turned. New interests and tendencies appear which have hitherto received no attention, or there is a sudden change of personality. During the incubation period of such a change we can often observe a loss of conscious energy: the new development has drawn off the energy it needs from consciousness. This lowering of energy can be seen most clearly …in the empty stillness which precedes creative work.

Jung, The Psychology of the Transference, CW 16.

A different nourishment

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Do not ask
for flowery perfume
when I can give you
fruits of autumn

Do not reject nourishment
because winter is at the door
and already the old saints
have raised their brows
to contemplate eternity
We children of the moment
drink up the last of the wine.

Lalla Romana, 1906 – 2001 Italian poet