Tag: balance

Mid-Winter wisdom

Karl Duffy5 Comments

Sometimes withdrawal and letting go is as much part of growth as is achievement and moving forward:

There is a tendency to want to hurry from autumn to spring, to avoid the long dark days that winter brings. But winter darkness has a positive side to it. As we gather to celebrate the first turn from winter to spring, we are invited to recognize and honor the beauty in the often unwanted season of winter. Let us invite our hearts to be glad for the courage winter proclaims. Let us be grateful for the wisdom winter brings in teaching us about the need for withdrawal as an essential part of renewal. Let us also encourage our spirits as Earth prepares to come forth from this time of withdrawal into a season filled with light.

Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr, The Circle of Life

The days shorten: living fully

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past.

To come into the present is to stop the war.

Jack Kornfield

Sunday Quote:The best gift

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

Today the Christian Liturgy starts to chant the O Antiphons –   aspirations used since the 5th Century in the final days before Christmas and which resonate with deep needs in our humanity,

The first of them wishes that we may grow in wisdom at this time of year around the Winter Solstice, when the days are shorter and nature quietens down, and we can see more clearly the bare elements in our lives. What maters most? In many old traditions, having a wise perspective on what was important in life was greatly treasured. In some ways it is the best gift one could get in these days, leading to a resting of the mind and contentment.

To the mind that is still,

the whole universe surrenders.

Lao Tzu

Always wanting

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As already said earlier in Advent, this time of year is good for noticing the restlessness of the human heart and the different ways it seeks to satisfy itself. Like other energies, desire passes through the mind-body, frequently in short bursts and is not permanent. Desire is to be understood and we come to see that we can let go of it.

But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though no twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,

and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.

It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child’s fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?

Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.

Margaret Atwood, The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart

 

Versions of ourselves

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Most of us are not open most of the time, we pretend that we are open, but mostly you’re running your own dramatic event of which you are the hero or the heroine. Usually that’s what we are doing most of the time.

The youth stops being so important, you’re too tired to maintain the hero that you think you are or the failure that you think you are, whatever the version of yourself that you bought into is — “I’m this failure, I’m not enough, or I’m this” … I’m more than anybody understands.

Those versions of yourself are not very useful.

Leonard Cohen, on what he learnt in his time in a Zen Monastery

From the heart

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Many native cultures believe that the heart is the bridge between Father Sky and Mother Earth. For these traditions, the ‘four-chambered heart,’ the source for sustaining emotional and spiritual health, is described as being full, open, clear, and strong. These traditions feel that it is important to check the condition of the four-chambered heart daily, asking: ‘Am I full-hearted, open-hearted, clear-hearted, and strong-hearted?’

Angeles Arrien 1940 – 2014, Cultural anthropologist.