Express yourself completely, then keep quiet.
Strong winds do not last all morning,
And the heavy rains do not last all day.
What causes them?
Heaven and Earth.
If Heaven and Earth cannot make things last forever,
How can we?
Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching
Tag: Be fully present
The weather forecast
In Ireland we love talking about the weather, especially over a Bank Holiday weekend, as if Nature should have known to provided sunshine for our few days. Sometimes it can be a way of avoiding conversations with a real connection, but it can be a way of working with something which is always changing, in a country that has four seasons in an hour.
I never read weather forecasts. As soon as I read one, tomorrow is clouded for me, even if it is sunshine that’s predicted. A part of me is making plans, or second-guessing the heavens; a part of me is saying, “I should be able to get in a second walk tomorrow, though by Sunday night it’s going to be cold again.” When it turns out different, as it often will, all my thinking is in vain.
It isn’t that weather forecasts mess with my mind. It’s that the mind is so ready to mess with everything it touches — to make theories around it, to draw fanciful conclusions from it, to play distorting games of projection and miscalculation — that even the elements are not safe from it. It has a supreme gift, I’ve found, for complicating the simple and muddying what could and should be transparent. It can take the tiniest detail and turn it into a drama or a universe of needless speculation. Most times I dread a coming moment, the moment never comes. It’s not the world that I need to change, I see, but the mayhem that my overactive mind makes of the world.
Pico Iyer, The Folly of the Weather Forecast
Staying true
I have always thought of courage
as the willingness
to let the deepest longing of my soul grow larger
than any fear that might arise.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
Living bravely and beautifully
One life on this earth is all that we get,
whether it is enough or not enough,
and the obvious conclusion would seem to be
that at the very least we are fools
if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.
Frederick Buechner, born 1926, American author and theologian
Keeping a place for music
We should not try to tame our hearts or become too focused on the to-do lists of our days:
Wild sings the bird of the heart
in the forests of our lives.
Mary Oliver
Little moments of wonder in a day
Even brief, five minute, encounters – if we have eyes to see – can contain a lifetime, and make a day special
Unexpected wonders happen,
not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen,
but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
Wendell Berry
