Tag: balance

A flash of lightning

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I had a conversation the other morning with a friend on the need to have a certain lightness in the way we hold life each day, a kind of simplicity. Getting the balance between the demands of love and the pull it places on the heart on one hand and detachment  on the other is not easy. However, modern society stimulates attachment,  so the letting-go perspective of all the wisdom and religious traditions is a useful reminder.  The fact that it is a consistent presence in all cultures would suggest that it is a truth closely related to our deepest happiness:

So you should view this fleeting world
As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Diamond Sutra

A pilgrim soul

Karl Duffy1 Comment

mullaghrellan woods

In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission.

When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition.

It will always mean leaving something behind,…

The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain.

David Richo, How to be an Adult

Determination

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And consider, always, every day,

the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles. 

Mary Oliver

photo Takashi Hososhima

A place within

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Philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time. So that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven’t had a true moment for yourself. And you know, to relax in and to just be.

Because, you know, the way in this country — there’s all the different zones. I think there are these zones within us as well. There’s surface time, which is really a rapid-fire Ferrari time… over-structured, like, and stolen from you, thieved all the time.

And what I love in this regard is my old friend Meister Eckhart…..he said, “There is a place in the soul — there is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch.” And I really thought that was amazing, and if you cash it out, what it means is, that in — that your identity is not equivalent to your biography. And that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

John O Donohue, Interview with Krista Tippett, On Being

photo AgCam

Sunday Quote: Life is short

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leaves in wood

We need to give up what no longer works

and find new ways of being

that keep us close to what matters

Mark Nepo

A new month: Unexpected gifts

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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As life becomes harder … it also becomes richer,

because the fewer expectations we have,

the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.

Etty Hillesum, born 1914,  died in Auschwitz 1943.