Tag: Be fully present

The core conversation

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

It might be surprising to think that there are just as many forms of courage and creativity associated with disappearance and doing without; just as many satisfying elements of aliveness associated with a winter as with spring. This central, core conversation to which we return in each succeeding winter is both nourishing and deeply disturbing, it seems heedless of any flimsy structures we may have erected, it seems fiery in that it burns familiar things away and yet provides another form of warmth emanating from a more nested, interior hearth. In my experience the first necessity of an individual in finding this fiery, core conversation is a radical form of simplification. To get to the core conversation we have to withdraw from the edges. Whatever expenses we have been making at the margins of our lives in terms of emotions, finances or time-based commitment must be brought back to the central conversation that makes the most sense.

David Whyte

Noticing beauty

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

A good intention for this year would not necessarily be to do more, but to turn up fully for our lives and experience deeply the beauty in each moment:

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed,

whether or not we will or sense them.  

The least we can do is try to be there.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Patience

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Quick fixes and abrupt changes are encouraged around this time of year. I prefer the slower perspective chosen by the Japanese painter Hokusai Katsushika:

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.

Enough

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

If we do not push ourselves enough, we do not grow, but if we push ourselves too much, we regress.

What is enough will change, depending on where we are and what we are doing.

In that sense, the present moment is always some kind of beginning.

 Sakyong Mipham, Running with the Mind of Meditation

A new response

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response.

That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. 

“Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

Mary Oliver

Sunday Quote: Ending and beginning

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

All endings are also beginnings.

We just don’t know it at the time.

Mitch Albom