Tag: Awareness

Just watching

Karl Duffy2 Comments

I remember I would sometimes go visit Ajahn Sumedho in his room. On the wall he had a picture of an old man sitting inside his little cottage on a rainy day, sitting just inside the window, looking out, and in his hand he held a cup of coffee. And I remember Ajahn Sumedho saying, for him this was the essence of meditation. It was really nothing more than just relaxing, and watching the happening of existence. Nothing needed to be explained. Nothing needed to be worked out. There’s just the event of existence presenting itself. Everything we are is simply presented. Whatever words come out, come out, but they’re not important; they’re simply the movement or the non-movement of whatever this happening is and it’s happening all by itself.

Darryl Bailey

True freedom is related to absolute trust

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It is hard to find better guidance than this. Knowing it deep down would be so nice: to be without anxiety about my imperfections or messy reality or about what is not fully achieved in my life:

One thing, all things,  they move and intermingle without distinction.

To live in this realization

is to be without anxiety about imperfection.

The mind of absolute trust is beyond all thought, all striving,

is perfectly at peace,  for in it there is no yesterday, no today, no tomorrow.

Seng T’san, 7th Century Zen Patriarch,  Hsin Hsin Ming

The light is everything

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The weekend, which allows the possibility to get out in nature, is a good time to share some of Mary Oliver’s poetry.  This one is about flowers and how some are less “perfect” than others. But it is also about  relationships and what hopes we have for our heart, about a greater beauty that embraces the clearly imperfect and allows us cast away the hassles of the everyday which are not us. We are nourished.

Shared moments, flowers, meanings and the stories that feed us.

What in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided–
and that one wears an orange blight–
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away–
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Mary Oliver, The Ponds

A bigger container

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Wordsworth invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective.

Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring?

Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with.

Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

What sustains us on the way

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Mystery is not much in favor these days. The notion that there are limits to what we can do, what we can know, limits to our dominion, does not sit well with kings and queens of the hill. Humility and reverence, we hear, are the attitudes of cowards. . . . By ‘mystery’ I do not mean simply the blank places on our maps. I mean the divine source — not a void, not a darkness, but an uncapturable fullness. We are sustained by processes and powers that we can neither fathom nor do without. I speak of that ground as holy because it is ultimate, it is what makes us possible, that shapes and upholds everything we see. The stories I am most interested in hearing, reading, and telling, are those that help us imagine our lives in relation to that ground.

Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World

Moments of orange light: An invitation to happiness

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A very grey start to the day here in Ireland …but every day we are given opportunities to collect little moments of colour that give us courage to keep going and renew happiness.

We are invited not just to live life, but to celebrate it.

The poppies send up their orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while, the roughage

shines like a miracle as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course, loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light is an invitation
to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.

Inside the bright fields, touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do —
what can you do about it —
deep, blue night?

Mary Oliver, Poppies