Every year, everything
I have ever learned in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods
The tendency in today’s world is to do more and more, to take on more tasks and responsibilities, to have a certain pride when telling people that we are “very busy”. For some this can mean the need to do more and more study, for others the push to get more achieved in a day, and for some others it even extends to an anxiety to develop their inner life as one other thing to be “done”. However, all of this energy can mean that we find it hard to allow our work or our activities feel sufficient for the day or for the week. We find reflections on this in all wisdom traditions. The Gospel of Matthew tells us that “sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof “, encouraging us to deal with one day at a time, and not dwell excessively in the future. And I have always found the French translation of a familiar phrase from the Our Father to be more insightful than the English – Donne–nous aujourd‘hui notre pain de ce jour – “Give us this day our bread for this day”. In other words, enough to support us this day and no more. It encourages us to let go at the end of a day – or a working week – and be content. There is a great benefit for our overall wellbeing in drawing limits to the amount we try to do.
“Enough” is a verb, a conversation, a fugue, a collaboration. It is not a static state, something achieved or accomplished. It is relational, by nature unpredictable, punctuated by wonder, surprise, and awe. It may feel dangerous and inefficient. It demands that we stay awake, pay attention to what is true in this moment, in our hearts, and make the choices always and only from that place. Then whatever we decide brings a sense of rightness and sufficiency, arriving with an exhale, a letting go, a sense that this, here, for now, is enough.
A life of enough is born in every moment — in the way we listen, the way we respond to the world, the way we see what is and tell the truth of who we are. Every single choice, every single moment, every change of course can bring us closer to a life of peace, contentment, authenticity, and easy sufficiency, a life of being, having, and doing enough.
Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough
When you rest in God, you just go home to yourself like the wave on the water. If the wave continues to search, she will never find the water. The only way to find the water is to go home to herself. When she realizes that she is water, she has peace. She practices resting in God in the here and the now. Although she continues to rise and fall, she is peaceful. We can practice Love as the ground of our being: Home.
Sometimes people think that when they meditate there should be no thoughts and emotions at all; and when thoughts and emotions do arise, they become annoyed and exasperated with themselves and think that they have failed. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a Tibetan saying: ‘It’s a tall order to ask for meat without bones, and tea without leaves.” So long as you have a mind, there will be thoughts and emotions.
Just as the ocean has waves, or the sun has rays, so the mind’s own radiance is its thoughts and emotions. The ocean has waves, yet the ocean is not particularly disturbed by them. The waves are the very nature of the ocean. Waves will rise, but where do they go? Back into the ocean. And where do waves come from? The ocean. In the same manner, thoughts and emotions are the radiance and expression of the very nature of the mind. They rise from the mind, but where do they dissolve? Back into the mind. Whatever arises, do not see it as a particular problem. If you do not impulsively react, if you are only patient, it will once again settle into its essential nature.
Sogdal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Words are the cognitive contraptions we use to work our way through a world of uncertainty. Words can free us: as symbols they are essential to distance us from experience enough to compare and contrast and reveal patterns in a complex universe. Seeing those patterns with ideas framed in our mind also enables us to communicate those insights to others. In these ways words are a wonderful gateway to understanding and sharing.
Yet words can also entrap us. If we do not recognize the limitations of their boundaries, if we see them as real, their top-down influences on our lives can be devastating. We can come to believe that “intelligence” is something we are either born with, or not. We can think that “we” are good and “they” bad. We can even feel that “I” is something so real and important that “you” don’t matter. Letting go of such top-down influences is the art of mindful awareness. The receptivity of presence allows us to unleash the shackles that automatically enslave us.
Daniel J. Siegel. The Mindful Brain
Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world. . . . Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You must make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. In a certain sense, you do not need the whole armory and vocabulary of therapies, psychologies, or spiritual programs. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you. These are some wonderful lines from the French poet Rene Char: “Intensity is silent, its image is not. I love everything that dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me.” Here is an image of silence as the force that discloses hidden depth.
John O Donohue, Anam Chara
