Most people view themselves as waves and forget that they are also water. They are used to living in the realm of birth and death, and they forget about the realm of no birth and no death. Just as a wave lives the life of water, so, too, do we live the life of no birth and no death
Thich Nhat Hanh
Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.
Pema Chodron
Living without contention, we are well-rooted in the earth. Zen poets say we become a mature bamboo – steady at the base, flexible in strong winds, and responsive to the movement of life. The strength of non-contentiousness brings patience and trust. The poet Rilke reminds us,
“Being fully alive means not numbering or counting,
but ripening like a tree which doesn’t force its sap and stands confidently in the storms of winter
not afraid that summer might not come.
It does come. It always comes.”
Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart
Each person becomes a wanderer again and again in the course of life, as we find our true self by becoming lost. Each person carries a “story that could be true.” Each crossroad in life secretly asks the question: Who are you really?
Michael Meade, 1944 – American author and mythologist.
In the Christian Calendar today is the feast of Candlemas. While not as old as the Celtic feast of yesterday, it does date from the 4th Century in Jerusalem, and reflects the same need to mark this moment, halfway between the winter and the spring solstices. It brought light into the darkness – in the Celtic tradition by the lighting of fires, in the Christian by a procession of candles and the blessing of candles for use in the home.
Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.
Mary Oliver, The Ponds (extract)
Today is the Celtic feast of Imbolc, the start of the Spring in the old Celtic calendar and here in Ireland. The meaning of Imbolc may derive from an old Irish word meaning “in the belly”, referring to sheep being pregnant. It was connected with the budding of new life, which although hidden, gives rise to hope because Spring will soon be here.
Hiding is underestimated. We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world…..Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named.
We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure; our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light too much, too early and too often, our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with too easily articulated ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others. What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about our selves….Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.
David Whyte, Consolations
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