Tag: balance

The gentler way of nature

Karl Duffy1 Comment

leaves-on-ground

The first week back to work over. Nature has a gentler pace than the one imposed by our minds and seems to have  different phases – growth, slowing down,  covering over and rest. Thus, despite all the clamour to change we hear in these first weeks,  we can choose to have some natural rest and a time of quiet,  not always striving – allowing the different parts of our lives to just be .

You begin to see that there are seasons in your life, in the same way as there as seasons in nature. There are times to cultivate, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally there are those times that are cold and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.

Chogram Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule

Begin again

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Sea shore kerala.jpg

Often the message this time of year is to completely re-shape or transform ourselves. This can sometimes mask a kind of aggression towards ourselves and suggest that most change needs to be dramatic. In most cases acceptance, integration and starting over are what is really needed :

That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb,  when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.

Mark Nepo, Hearing the Cries of the World

Not seen but real

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Water spout.jpg

There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.

Hafiz

Right now

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:The park bench (2669222928).jpg

We can spend our whole lives waiting to start living, instead of loving fully, even though we are flawed.  As Emerson reminds us: “Give all for love. Obey thy heart…when half-gods go, the gods appear”

Sit down wherever you are
And listen to the wind singing in your veins.
Feel the love, the longing, the fear in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are, right now,
Not who you would like to be,
Not the saint you are striving to become,
But the being right here before you, inside you, around you.
All of you is holy.
You are already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out, Touch in,
Let go.

John Welwood

photo rosino

Not rushing to fix ambiguities

Karl Duffy2 Comments

dark-river

The period between Christmas and New Year has a distinct tone and  a change of rhythm. There is an intensity about the Christmas period which can stir us up; to add to this we will soon be bombarded by the messages of New Year resolutions and dramatically  fixing our lives. So one or two posts about how to deal with this time, when the temptation is often to make abrupt changes in the face of the different parts of our lives.

There is a certain type of uncertainty which is just part of being human, and which we cannot control, such as that which comes from illness. This fundamental ambiguity – the unsatisfactory nature of life and of circumstances  – is always there in the background. It can be accentuated at periods like Christmas, and we intensify our efforts to get solid ground. So the dilemma is how to live wholeheartedly as adults in the realization that some elements will always be displeasing and we are never fully going to get it all together. How can we hold different parts together  – “manage the grey” – when we prefer things to be simply black or white: 

Most of us are uncomfortable when things are undefined, when things are not clearly to or for, up or down, left or right, or right or wrong. But the deeper truths always take time to reach us, and it is our job to enter a practice of waiting openly – which involves enduring the tensions of not-knowing. The truths that matter require us not to form opinions or beliefs hastily. On the contrary, we are asked to allow time to surround us with the Wholeness of life, to take the time required for the paradox of truth to show itself. It seems that the practice of not-knowing begins with a trust in the unnameable space that holds us, in the mysterious atmosphere in which we all live. That seems to be the true space of listening and learning, where our brief experiences of life in its totality, whether harsh or calm, will not fit into our tidy little maps of perception.

Mark Nepo

Saddened

Karl Duffy2 Comments
  • File:Underaged refugees in a camp located at the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, 30 January 2016.jpg

The Christian calendar is quite wise in placing the feast-day of the Slaughter of the Innocents today,  just immediately after the Christmas celebrations. It faces into the reality of this world, with the sad turns which we cannot understand, and the fact that we can lose that which is most important to us, due to factors which are unexpected or outside of our control.  It is the opposite to the distracting tactics which we see scattered all through the modern understanding of this holiday.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world

without being saddened very often.

Erich Fromm

photo Mstyslav Chernov

Underaged refugees in a camp located at the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, 30 January 2016.