What I want most
is to spring out of this personality
then to sit apart from that leaping.
I have lived too long where I can be reached
Rumi
photo Glendalough June 18, 2015
Tag: balance
Learning to be calm
Now and again the earth begins to desire rest. And in the weeks of autumn especially it shows its disposition to calm, to what feels like a stasis, a pause. The ocean retains its warmth, while high white cloud-boats ride out of the west. Now the birds of the woods are often quiet, but on the shore, the migrating sanderlings and plovers are many and vocal, rafts of terns with the year’s young among them come with the incoming tides, and plunge into the waves, and rise with silver leaves in their beaks. One can almost see the pulsing of their hearts, vigorous and tiny in the trim of white feathers. Where I live, on the harbor edge of the Cape’s last town, perfect strangers walking along the beach turn and say to each other, without embarrassment or hesitation: isn’t it beautiful.
Mary Oliver, Where I Live
photo mozzercork @ flickr
Preparing to live or living?
We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Complete right now
Enlightenment involves derailing and deconstructing the sense of lack. It is getting rid of that piece of psychology that in every moment says, ‘There’s something else that I should be having right now. There’s something else that I should be right now. There’s somewhere else that I could go right now. There’s somebody else who’s got it better than me right now. I’m not complete right now. I need to be something right now”.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami: Ways to Cross Life’s Floods
photo sookie
Loss and love
The start of November is the start of Winter in the old Celtic calendar, and even if we follow a more universal way of marking time, there is no denying the shortening of the days and increasing darkness. One can see why one of the themes associated with this time of year is letting go. Is is also easy to understand why today became All Souls Day, the traditional day for remembering those who have died. It is still celebrated as an important day in the Latin countries, such as Italy, where cemeteries are covered in flowers as families take time to visit and remember. Sadness on a day like today is related to love, when we cannot be with someone who is dear to us. Learning how to live life fully and gratefully in each moment and yet still hold things lightly is one of the hardest and yet most important inner practices in our every day and in our lives.
All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I’m sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is.
Frank O’Connor, 1903 – 1966, Irish writer of short stories
photo dudva
The stories we tell, the metaphors we use
Most of us have a metaphor, conscious or not, that names our experience of life. Animated by the imagination, one of the most vital powers we possess, our metaphors are more than mirrors to reality — they often become reality, transmuting themselves from language into the living of our lives. We do well to choose our metaphors wisely.
“Seasons” is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all — and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.
Parker Palmer, From Language to Life
photo SK
