Today is the Feast of Candlemas, which echoes themes found in many traditions around this time – new life, the first budding of plants, the return of the sun – light and warmth at the halfway point between the winter and the spring solstices.
We need constant reminders of the presence of light.
We are stars wrapped in skin,
The light you are seeking has always been within.
Rumi
Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:
Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk.
Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.
Horace, 65 – 8 BC, Ode 1, 11
The mind is exactly this tree, that grass….
without thought or feeling both disappear
Ikkyu, 1394 – 1481 , Zen Buddhist monk and poet.
Many of us have been running all our lives. We have the feeling that we need to run — into the future, away from the past, out from wherever we are. In truth, we don’t need to go anywhere. We just need to sit down and look deeply to discover that the whole cosmos is right here within us.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Aristotle concluded that bliss is not about perfection. You have to deal with bad fortune sometimes. The difference is whether you approach it with nobility and a great soul. What is a great soul or ‘mega-soul?’ Souls get big from opening out beyond the limitations of human knowledge and control. Everyone is called to be a mystic of some sort, and being open to mystery and myth, the intuitive and the non-rational, to art and ritual, to nature and animals, to absurd ideas and outrageous fantasies gives the soul room to fashion a lovable and thoughtful human being. However simple your life, however ordinary and retiring, you can have a mega-soul, a vast source of vitality, and the capacity for pain and failure as well. You can be noble in your simplicity and deep and wide in your ability to contain life.
Thomas Moore
When I experience difficult mind states that I cannot control, I know their source is in my own mind and that nothing happens externally. Even when a clearly external event has triggered the response of fear or sadness that has manifested as anger, it is essentially the grid of the mind that has shaped that response. Knowing that negativity or aversion is a transient energy never means to ignore it. It means to see it clearly, always, and work with it wisely.
Sylvia Boorstein
