Tag: balance

….in a shifting world

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

rope_bridgeIt’s often said that consumer society surrounds us with things and encourages us to pay too much attention to things, but in a way I think that’s also misleading. We live in a world that seems to be extremely unstable, to consist of fleeting images. A world that increasingly, thanks in part, I think, to the technology of mass communications, seems to acquire a kind of hallucinatory character. A kind of fantastic world of images, as opposed to a world of solid objects that can be expected to outlast one’s own lifetime. What has waned, perhaps, is the sense of living in a world that existed before one’s self and will outlast one’s self.

Christopher Lasch, Beating the retreat into private life

A solid base…

Karl Duffy3 Comments

sitting2Our breathing is a stable solid ground that we can take refuge in. Regardless of our internal weather- our thoughts, emotions and perceptions- our breathing is always with us like a faithful friend. Whenever we feel carried away, or sunken in a deep emotion, or scattered in worries and projects, we return to our breathing to collect and anchor our mind. We feel the flow of air coming in and going out of our nose. We feel how light and natural, how calm and peaceful our breathing functions. At any time, we can return to this peaceful source of life.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Different worlds within

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

If we become addicted to the externals our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of your inner world. This wholesomeness  is natural; to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.

John O’Donohue, Anam Chara.

Under the snow

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

DSCN0239Since we have our first snow and our first hard frost, and the seeds within the hardened earth lie and wait:

In fall the cricket beneath the rose bush
watches as the roses fall to the very ground that is his kingdom also.

So they’re neighbors, one full of fragrance,
the other the harper of a single dry song.

 We call this time of the year
the beginning of the end of another circle,

a convenience and nothing more.

For the cricket’s song
is surely a prayer,
and a prayer, when it is given, is given forever.

This is a truth I’m sure of, for I’m older than I used to be,

and therefore I understand things
nobody would think of
who’s young and in a hurry.

The snow is very beautiful. Under it are the lingering
petals of fragrance, and the timeless body of prayer.

Mary Oliver, The Cricket and the Rose

Let go of an idea of perfection

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves–from other people, relationships, or material goods – or from our own self-development – we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But ……completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

Mark Epstein

Who we truly are

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I had a nice conversation yesterday on the challenge of finding purpose within,  in a world which has lost many of the traditional  places or containers which used to supply meaning in the past. It is a challenge all through life, and it comes down to having some degree of comfort  in our sense of who we are and where we are at this moment. In other words, as Winnicott says, “we gather the personality together from within”  by developing a  capacity to be at ease with an interior “formlessness and comfortable solitude”, without being afraid,  or needing to fill the space with objects and distractions. In this way we unlearn a lot of the messages which come from our restless society or from the wounds of our own history:

To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core. Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God.

Mark Nepo,