Our minds are often very intent on knowing the outcome, on fixing things down into this or that:
Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.
Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.
Rumi, Story Water
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
Even brief, five minute, encounters – if we have eyes to see – can contain a lifetime, and make a day special
Unexpected wonders happen,
not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen,
but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
Wendell Berry
Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness
Jean Vanier
If you remember nothing else, always remember this one great secret of spiritual practice: we don’t have to feel any particular way. We don’t have to have special experiences, nor do we have to be any particular way. With whatever arises, whether it’s pleasing or not, try to remember that all we can do is experience and work with whatever our life is right now. No matter what life is and no matter how we feel about it, all that matters in practice is whether we can honestly acknowledge what is going on, and then stay present with the physical experience of that moment.
Ezra Bayda, Zen Heart
Mindfulbalance 