Tag: balance

Days that restore

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Holzöster See Frühjahr2010.JPG

Sabbath honors the necessary wisdom of dormancy. If certain plant species, for example, do not lie dormant for winter, they will not bear fruit in the spring. If this continues for more than a season, the plant begins to die. If dormancy continues to be prevented, the entire species will die. A period of rest – in which nutrition and fertility most reality coalesce – is not simply a human psychological convenience; it is a spiritual and biological necessity.

Wayne Muller,  Sabbath

photo werner100359

and quieting the spirit

Karl Duffy1 Comment

portmarnock sun

It is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit
Among the flux of happenings.

Something had pestered me so much
I thought my heart would break.
I mean the mechanical part.

I went down in the afternoon
To the sea which held me, until I grew easy.

About tomorrow, who knows anything.
Except that it will be a time, again,
For the deepening and the quieting of the spirit.

Mary Oliver, Swimming, One Day in August

Resting the mind

Karl Duffy4 Comments

File:Camara hpE327 155.jpg

All mental activity, all these choices and possibilities, is confusing and even exhausting. Just as the body needs regular rest, so does the mind. To rest the mind in complete stillness, in pure awareness, is to return it to its original nature, its natural state. We don’t need to narrate all the events of our life. We don’t need the mind to comment internally on everything and everyone we encounter. This narration, these comments, separates us from just experiencing life as it is.

Jan Chozen Bays, How to Train a Wild Elephant

A tolerance for not knowing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Rock garden, Portland Japanese Garden.jpg

John Keats, the great English Romantic poet, writing  about the qualities needed for  full openness to the infinite depth of the world and of the person:

When man is capable of being in uncertainties,

Mysteries, doubts,

without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Letter to George and Tom Keats,  December 1817

photo: heather

…and seeing its true meaning

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File:Farmer plowing in Fahrenwalde, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany.jpg

Every person, in the course of his life, must build — starting with the natural territory of his own self — a work, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout all his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time  narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world.

 Teilhard de Chardin

photo ralf roletschek

Light and shade….

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File:Moon in the clouds.jpg

The Full Moon is more beautiful

when partially obscured by clouds.

Murata Shuko