Coming to the mid point of winter, short dark days
Life is uncertain, surprises are likely.
If you are ….in a dark place, you still have what really counts.
If you are in a predicament, there will be a gate.
John Tarrant, It Would Be a Pity to Waste A Good Crisis
A full moon tonight, the last of the year, the Cold Moon, as we approach the shortest day of the year.
There are times when,
If the circumstances are just right,
Like a full moon,
A light rain,
Twilight, or fog,
There is a momentary crossing
From time to timelessness,
Form to Formless,
Blood and bone to earth and rock,
Past and future to present.
Where the atoms, the molecules of me
Forget to stop
From fusing into the earth and other places
Where I am not lost, but found,
Not part, but whole,
No longer longing for myself.
Parker Palmer
So often we run from feeling and yet it is only through feeling that we can know the depth of life. Only through feeling can we hold the smallest shell or bone and feel the tug of the Universe. Such raw being aches, for, as the Buddhists say, the bareness of being here is so full. …With no way to that bareness but through feeling and the listening that feeling opens….. Through this bareness of being, we refresh our openness and enliven our innate connection to the one living sense. Through our unblocked, sincere response to life, we can tune our inner person with the great mysteries.
Mark Nepo
There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man standing alongside the road, shouts, “Where are you going?” and the first man replies, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don’t know where we are going, and we can’t stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war within ourselves…We have to learn the art of stopping – stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us.
Thich Nhat Hahn, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. And when people start believing in progress – in the idea that history is headed toward an ever more perfect future – they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future. And so they try to quell their anxieties by cramming their lives with experience.
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use it
Qualities to keep the heart open: Be as patient as the moss and as vulnerable as the oaks.
Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about
spiritual patience? Isn’t it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?
Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.
Mary Oliver, Landscape (extract)
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