Discernment is a process of letting go what we are not
Father Thomas Keating, Cistercian monk, author of Open Mind, Open Heart
photo mschlindwein
Tag: balance
The way changes as we walk it
Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident.
To get back before dark
is the art of going.
Wendell Berry, Travelling at Home
photo: padawane
No Maps
It’s so tempting to want the answers before we begin the journey. We like to know our way. We like to have maps. We like to have guides. But we are more like a breathing puzzle, a living bag of pieces, and each day shows us what a piece or two is for, where it might go, how it might fit. Over time, a picture starts to emerge by which we begin to understand our place in the world. Unfortunately we waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of vital inner fortitude by asking others to map our way. The instructions are in the living.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Map of Ireland 1592 by Abraham Ortelius
Losing and starting again
We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up on great roots;
Like mad poets captured by the Moors,
Men who live out
A second life.
Robert Bly, A Home in the Dark Grass
A wider container
Awareness is not the same as thought.
It lies beyond thinking, although it makes no use of thinking, honoring its value and its power.
Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thought as thought rather than getting caught up in them as reality.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever You go, There you are
photo Wagner Machado Carlos Lemes
Not trying to impress
The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share.
Peter Matthiessen, the Snow Leopard
