Tag: balance

Being led

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led — make of that what you will.

Wedndell Berry, Jayber Crow, A Novel

Here and not here

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Acknowledging that there is a groundlessness at the heart of the human condition, or an unsatisfactory element to our experience, is part of most spiritual traditions. As Pema Chodron says: “The truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure.…”

Why are we made the way we are made, that to love

Is to want?

Well, you are gone now, and this morning I have walked out

To the back shore,

To the ocean which, even if we think we have measured it,

Has not final measure.

Sometimes you can see the great whales there,

Breaching and playing.

Sometimes the swans linger just long enough

For us to be astonished.

Then they lift their wings, they become again

A part of the untouchable clouds.

Mary Oliver, There you were and it was like spring

Just the way life is

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Some days are good, some days are bad.

Today is one of them.

Lawrence Welk, American musician and bandleader, 1903 – 1992

The distance doesn’t matter

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The distance doesn’t matter;

it is only the first step that counts

La distance n’y fait rien; il n’y a que le premier pas qui coûte.

Marquise du Deffand, 1697 – 1780, French hostess and patron of the arts. She was commenting on the popular legend of Saint Denis who was said to have walked for 6 miles carrying his head after being beheaded. 

Sunday Quote: Ordinary

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A common man marvels at uncommon things.

A wise man marvels at the commonplace.

Confucius

Something is always far away.

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We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it,  rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire……. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost