Tag: balance

Learning from nature in time of stress

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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry, The Peace Of Wild Things

The basic practice

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The basic practice is how to enjoy — how to enjoy walking and sitting and eating and showering. It’s possible to enjoy every one, but our society is organized in such a way that we don’t have time to enjoy. We have to do everything too quickly…. There are two things: to be and to do. Don’t think too much about to do — to be is first. To be peace. To be joy. To be happiness. And then to do joy, to do happiness — on the basis of being. So first you have to focus on the practice of being. Being fresh. Being peaceful. Being attentive. Being generous. Being compassionate. This is the basic practice.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Balance in life

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In the Christian Calendar, the three most important days of the year begin, ones which give meaning to sustain  the rest of the year. They are days for reflection, punctuated by old familiar rituals of water and fire. We all need rhythms in our lives, moments of celebration  – religious or otherwise –  allowing us time to pause and take a break from the rush of our working lives. Ritual days like these, which mark the passing of time are very important, especially in this modern age which blends each day and each season into periods of work and possibilities for more shopping. We need to ensure that there are real moments of non-work in our lives where we celebrate other realities and other rhythms, not just evenings where we crash, tired from work, trying to recharge before it starts again the next day. These rhythms are indispensable for balance and for nourishing our deepest self. We take time off, we slow down, we rest and reflect.  In doing so we find that each element  in the familiar patterns becomes, even though they are known through repetition,  fresh and meaningful again. The messages that come around again in the great cycle of things are always new.

Wherever the arts are nourished through the festive contemplation of universal realities and their sustaining reasons, there in truth something like a liberation occurs: the stepping-out into the open under an endless sky, not only for the creative artist himself but for the beholder as well, even the most humble. Such liberation, such fore-shadowing of the ultimate and perfect fulfillment, is necessary for man, almost more necessary than his daily bread, which is indeed indispensable and yet insufficient. In this precisely do I see the meaning of that statement in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, ‘We work so we can have leisure.’

Josef Pieper,  Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation

In tune with our deepest nature, not what is expected

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If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings.  Sometimes the great famine of blessings in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love; rather, we are living the life that is expected of us.  We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.

John O Donohue

Steps

Karl Duffy4 Comments

In order to have peace and joy, you must succeed in having peace within each of your steps.  Your steps are the most important thing.  They decide everything. But often in our daily life, our steps are burdened with anxieties and fears.  Life itself seems to be a continuous chain of insecure feelings, and so our steps lose their natural easiness.  Our earth is truly beautiful.  There is so much graceful, natural scenery along paths and roads around the earth!   They are all available to us, yet we cannot enjoy them because our hearts are not trouble-free, and our steps are not at ease.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Seeing that change is just part of life

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Just as there are seasons in the world around us, so there are in our interior life.     Teresa of Avila

We can learn a lot around the change of the seasons, as in these days when Winter gives way to Spring. Not just the ongoing lesson about change and impermanence but from the fact that there is a parallel between our interior rhythm and the movement of the seasons. Winter is a time for conserving energy and reducing activity, whereas,  in some Eastern Wisdom traditions,  Spring is seen as having an energy which is expansive and outward moving. It is a time of new beginnings and potentially a renewal of spirit. And all around us we begin to see this, as there is a delicate but still fragile sense of renewal and new life. We see seeds beginning to sprout, flowers bloom, and the sun gently warming the earth. And we begin to see that despite the darkness and cold much has been going on unseen and underground for months. However, we also see the harm which the severe cold has done to some of the plants, who need cutting back or digging up. We too start again, making room for change, moving towards a sense of lightness, letting go of unhelpful habits of mind which hold us back or no longer give life.

There are seasons in your life in the same way as there are seasons in nature. There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they fade. And finally, of course, there are times of cold and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream.

These rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are. If you realize that each phase of your life is a natural occurrence, then you need not be swayed, pushed up and down by the changes in circumstance and mood that life brings.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule