Tag: balance

Our Inner world

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:US Navy 081005-N-1522S-023 A baby falls asleep in her father's arms during the homecoming for the guided-missile frigate USS McInerney (FFG 8) to at Naval Station Mayport after a six-month deployment.jpg

Do not despise your inner world. Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status.

But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.

What is the remedy…? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings.

Martha Nussbaum., American Philosopher, Lecturer in Ethics and Law, born 1947

The wrens nest

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File:Troglodyte-sylvain haye.jpg
Wrens 
make their nests of fancy threads 
and string ends, animals 
abandon all their money each year. 
What is it that men and women leave? 
Harder than wren’s doing, they have 
to abandon their longing for the perfect. 
The inner nest not made by instinct 
will never be quite round, 
and each has to enter the nest 
made by the other imperfect bird.
Robert Bly, from Eating the Honey of Words
photo sylvain haye

Sunday Quote: Step by step

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Learning to walk...step by step.jpg

If the path before you is clear,

you’re probably on someone else’s

Joseph Campbell

photo gthills

Bare Attention

Karl Duffy2 Comments

If you would look at a flower, any thought about that flower prevents you from looking at it. The words the rose, the violet, it is this flower, that flower, it is that species,  keep you from observing. To look there must be no interference of the word, which is the objectifying of thought. There must be freedom from the word, and to look there must be silence; otherwise you can’t look. If you look at your wife or husband, all the memories that you have had, either of pleasure or pain, interfere with looking. It is only when you look without the image that there is a relationship.

Jiddu Krisnmurti.

Photo Daniel J Layton

Slow time

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Rain on grass2.jpg

I went for a walk yesterday, but being Ireland, it started to rain and I had to abandon my plans. The day before had been so warm and bright…At times like this we can get irritated, as what “should” have happened gets disrupted. We rush on to the next moment, not noticing what is actually in front of us. We want reality to correspond to what we think should be going on, and do not go slow enough to notice what actually is:

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

John O’Donohue, A Blessing for One who is Exhausted.

photo adrian benko

Dropping our efforts

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Baby.jpg

Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don’t have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don’t you experience it? Because you’ve got to drop something. You’ve got to drop illusions. You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!

Anthony de Mello sj