Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning,
that without listening speaking no longer heals,
that without distance closeness cannot cure.
Henri Nouwen
Tag: growth
What’s personal
You should not take personally things that actually aren’t personal.
It turns out when you start to really dig down underneath it, there’s very little that’s personal.
Taking things personally is a prescription for infinite suffering.
Jon Kabat Zinn
photo of cows disturbing a walk along the beach at Whitepark Bay, Ireland, by gtapp
Growth
Life is a living of who we are, until that form of self can no longer hold us, and …we must break the forms that contain us in order to birth our way into the next self. This is how we shed our many ways of seeing the world, not that any are false, but that each serves its purpose for a time until we grow and they no longer serve us.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
photo lionel allorge
The start of Autumn
Here in the Irish and Celtic calendar, the season of Autumn began on Monday, the 1st of September. Although the weather is still very mild, the mornings are misty and some leaves have already started to fall. We are moving into a period which helps us reflect on impermanence and on the fact that all things change. Our meditation practice reminds us that there is only suffering to be had when we try to fix things solid, or hold onto them, like the long days of summer or the memories of times past. We instinctively prefer permanence and how it tells a story of a solid, single identity. Instead, in reality, like the seasons, we are always changing; things come and go in our lives. Nature lets go and moves on. Maybe we can learn from that.
If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.
If I can take the dark with open eyes
And call it seasonal, not harsh or strange
(For love itself may need a time of sleep),
And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,
Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure – if I can let you go.
May Sarton, Autumn Sonnets
photo of the Barrow river at Bagenalstown, Co. Carlow.
Why we frequently get it wrong
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms — withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.
Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
photo sajid213
Losing and starting again
We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up on great roots;
Like mad poets captured by the Moors,
Men who live out
A second life.
Robert Bly, A Home in the Dark Grass
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