Tag: Be fully present

One day more

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Cold here this week and snow falls. Some beautiful words to help us in challenging conditions

Windowsills evenly welcome both heat and cold.

Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.

Doors are not equivocal,  floorboards do not hesitate or startle.

Impatience does not stir the curtains,

a bed is neither irritable nor rapacious.

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room

we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,

pointing to hinge and plaster and wood —

          You are matter, as they are.

          See how perfectly it can be done.

          Hold, one day more, what is asked.   

Jane Hirshfield,  A Room

The mid winter spirit

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Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the mid winter spirit of our days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of ongoing surprise and with some wonder and appreciation, flawed and far from perfection, but inhabiting the still center of a beautiful, peripheral giftedness.

David Whyte, Finding the Holy in the Holidays

Seeing the river

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Since many places of worship have been closed these times, and we are removed from many of our usual supports,  we have developed sanctuaries and refuges inside ourselves

Once upon a time some disciples begged their old and ailing master not to die. “But if I do not go, how will you ever see?” the Master said to them. “What is it we can possibly see when you are gone?” one of them asked. With a twinkle in his eye, the Master answered, “All I ever did in my entire life was to sit on the river bank handing out river water. After I’m gone, I trust that you will notice the river.”

Found in Joan Chittister, in Thomas Merton: Seeder of Radical Action and the Enlightened Heart

Settle

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When the uncertainty of the current situation leads us to feel uprooted and we find our minds pulled in all directions by the latest news:

Settle the self on the self

and let your life force blossom

Blanche Hartman, Seeds for a Boundless Life: Zen Teachings from the Heart

Everything changes

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Everything is changing, including you.
That is an actual fact you can see.
This is not something you will know after reading many books.
So if you have a lot of suffering in your everyday life,
you will actually feel the most important teaching of Buddhism:
that everything changes, and there is nothing to stick to.

from the great Shunryu Suzuki roshi

Some light

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In the Christian Calendar today is the feast of Candlemas. While not as old as the Celtic feast of yesterday, it does date from the 4th Century in Jerusalem, and reflects the same need to mark this moment, halfway between the winter and the spring solstices. It brought light into the darkness – in the Celtic tradition by the lighting of fires, in the Christian by a procession of candles and the blessing of candles for use in the home.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Mary Oliver, The Ponds (extract)