Tag: Be fully present

Turn the pages

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Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

* * *
Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.

Mary Oliver, A Settlement

Stop a moment

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If I was asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to men of our century, I should simply say: In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you

Tolstoy, Essays, letters and Miscellanies

The way you travel

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Close is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done…close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.

Our human essence lies not in arrival but in being almost there: we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending unanticipated arrivals.

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfilment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go.

David Whyte, “Close” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Rest

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A bank Holiday here in Ireland.

What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?

Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 British Philosopher

Not noticing

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Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatique,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

Denise Levertov, Witness

The beauty in daily things

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Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful! a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.

Howard Nemerov, 1920 – 1991, Pulitzer Prize winning American Poet, Vermeer