Tag: Be fully present

Part of the human family

Karl Duffy1 Comment

How you respond to tragedy and suffering is one true measure of your strength. You need to see those moments as moments of growth. You need to look upon them as gifts to help you reclaim what is important in your life. The question you must ask yourself is not if you will heal, but how.  Grief and pain have their own duration, and when they begin to pass, you must take care to guide the shape of the new being you are to become.  So you should not fear tragedy and suffering.  Like love, they make you more a part of the human family.  From them can come your greatest creativity.  They are the fire that burns you pure.  

Kent Nerburn

Flowing with the river

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Life is always changing; we are always changing. We live in a river of change, and a river of change lives within us. Every day we’re given a choice: We can relax and float in the direction that the water flows, or we can swim hard against it. If we go with the river, the energy of a thousand mountain streams will be with us, filling our hearts with courage and enthusiasm. If we resist the river, we will feel rankled and tired as we tread water, stuck in the same place. “I’ve known rivers,” writes Langston Hughes. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” 

Am I going to flow with my river nature today, or am I going to swim against it? This is what I ask myself when I get out of bed each morning. And when I go to sleep, I apologize to the river gods for any hard strokes I made against the current, and for splashing about like a drowning person. I pray that tomorrow I may once again know the pleasure of following my soul downstream, because, I’ve known rivers — and once you’ve known rivers — once you’ve stretched out on the dark waters, trusting the river gods, going in the direction of life even if it is headfirst toward the rapids, you want to taste that water again; you want your soul to grow deep like the rivers again.

Elizabeth Lesser,  Broken Open

As wildflowers do

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Over and over we break
open, we break and
we break and we open.
For a while, we try to fix
the vessel — as if
to be broken is bad.
As if with glue and tape
and a steady hand we
might bring things to perfect
again. As if they were ever
perfect. As if to be broken is not
also perfect. As if to be open
is not the path toward joy.

The vase that’s been shattered
and cracked will never
hold water. Eventually
it will leak. And at some
point, perhaps, we decide
that we’re done with picking
our flowers anyway, and no
longer need a place to contain them
We watch them grow just
as wildflowers do — unfenced,
unmanaged, blossoming only
when they’re ready — and mygod,
how beautiful they are amidst
the mounting pile of shards.

Rosemery Wahtola Trommer, American Poet, The Way it is

 

Paradox and ambiguity

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As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, we feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We deserve something better than resolution: we deserve our birthright …an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity

Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

The world goes on

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Another Saturday, another Mary Oliver poem:

Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in  the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
In the family of things.

Wild Geese, (extract)

The Book of LIfe

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Just flip the pages of anyone’s life book; get beneath the story line, and what do you notice? Changeability, the unpredictable, the unforeseen (good and bad): to recall that, brings forth faith – be open and alert. A human life is also marked by an ongoing quest to find fulfilment – which hasn’t quite arrived (and maybe isn’t even near). Seeing that brings attention back to the present: what do you really want, and where will that be found? It’s never in that ongoing flow of continuity that the Buddha called ‘becoming’ (bhava). What about if the mind stepped out of that, into the immediate openness of an awareness that isn’t craving or dreading becoming anything? When you even review that tide of “now I’m this and I should be that, and I might get there” you realize that this goes on irrespective of circumstance and identity. So there’s nothing intrinsically personal about this life book, and you don’t have to throw it away and get a better one. The advice is to study it from a different viewpoint: it’s written in personal handwriting, but bear in mind and take it to heart, that the marks of change/risk/unpredictability (anicca), of incompleteness and the unresolved (dukkha), and of impersonality (anatta) are universal marks. Through bearing these in mind, there can be a breakthrough to the unconditioned, the secure, the sorrowless, the place of peace. One can step out of the book.

Ajahn Sucitto, Lockdown Means Opening Up