Tag: growth

Mid-Winter wisdom

Karl Duffy5 Comments

Sometimes withdrawal and letting go is as much part of growth as is achievement and moving forward:

There is a tendency to want to hurry from autumn to spring, to avoid the long dark days that winter brings. But winter darkness has a positive side to it. As we gather to celebrate the first turn from winter to spring, we are invited to recognize and honor the beauty in the often unwanted season of winter. Let us invite our hearts to be glad for the courage winter proclaims. Let us be grateful for the wisdom winter brings in teaching us about the need for withdrawal as an essential part of renewal. Let us also encourage our spirits as Earth prepares to come forth from this time of withdrawal into a season filled with light.

Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr, The Circle of Life

A new year

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The last day of the year in the Christian liturgical calendar. Advent and the preparation for Christmas starts tomorrow:

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter

Not limiting ourselves

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Our identity, which seems so reliable, so substantial,  is in fact very fluid, very  dynamic. There are unlimited possibilities to what we might think, what we might feel, and how we might experience reality. We have what it takes to free ourselves from the suffering of a fixed reality and connect with the fundamental ….mystery of our being, which has no fixed identity. Your sense of yourself – who you think you are at a relative level – is a very restricted version of who you truly are. 

Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change

Seeds planted

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This season calls us to the harvest. Seeds planted long ago create a bounty and fullness in our lives. Autumn invites me to remember the places in my life where I had a dream that once felt tiny and has now grown and ripened into fullness. I savor these places where my life feels abundant. I relish the experience of being nourished by dreams into my own growing wholeness.

The poet Rilke writes of autumn: “Command the last fruits to be full; / give them just two more southern days, / urge them on to completion and chase / the last sweetness into the heavy wine.” We move toward our own ripening and in that journey we let go of what no longer serves us. 

We live in times when it often feels like everything is coming undone. This season reminds us that the journey of relinquishing all we hold dear is also the journey of harvesting. Somehow these two come together year after year. We are invited to rest into its mystery.

What are you releasing that no longer energizes you?

What dreams do you want to harvest this season?

Christing Valter Paintner, Autumn Equinox: Honoring Harvest and Release

How we heal

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If there is a single definition of healing it is

to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical,

from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay

Steven Levine

There is always some fog

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Not knowing means embracing what is not known rather than fighting with yourself over it. Since the mind always strives to know, not knowing is disorienting in a useful way. Uncertainty and not knowing teach you not to believe the stories your mind feeds you day in and day out. If you allow your own course to be mysterious, then even the hard things can become easy. This is the beginning of awakening.

John Tarrant, Surprises on the Way