a grateful life

Picked some ripe blackberries beside the woodland path I walked along yesterday evening. Freely given, like all of life, and not to be taken, as we say, “for granted.” The only real response is gratefulness.

Be still, my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
though time is draining from the clock
and your walk, that was confident and quick,
has become slow.

So, be slow if you must, but let
the heart still play its true part.
Love still as once you loved, deeply
and without patience. Let God and the world
know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.

Mary Oliver, The Gift

Underneath

The peace that is the nature of being is not a state of the mind; it is the nature of the mind.

It is the peace that passeth understanding –

the peace that has nothing to do with what is, or what is not, taking place in experience

Rupert Spira, Your True Home, A Meditation on Experience

Control

To think we can control the world is an illusion.

But we can control how we relate to it.

Jon Kabat Zinn

The missing piece

I spent many years looking for the perfect place to live, the perfect spiritual teacher, the perfect path, the perfect career, the perfect community, and so on, before realizing that no such lasting perfection exists except as an imaginary idea.

The only real perfection is Here / Now, and it’s not about the content, it’s about the awareness and the presence that is here regardless of the content, not because of the content. I also spent many years chasing some final enlightenment event, some happy ending, believing that there was some Finish Line that I had not yet crossed.

Finally, that whole fixation and search for enlightenment fell away, not in any Big Bang event, but gradually and quietly and imperceptibly, and not because “I” became permanently enlightened at last, but because that very idea became transparently absurd.

Joan Tollifson

Rest

There is a way between voice and presence
where information flows.
In disciplined silence it opens.
With wandering talk it closes.
In wild silence the channel bursts.

Rest is the mother of wisdom.

Rumi

Sunday Quote: gratitude

I cannot pretend I am without fear.

But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.

I have loved and been loved;

I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

 Oliver Sacks, Gratitude