Tag: growth

Ebb and flow

Karl Duffy2 Comments

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible- in life as in love – is in growth, in fluidity… in freedom.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1906 – 2001, American author and aviator, Gift from the Sea

Change and letting go

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 Practice often entails confronting the unpalatable until one’s reactions have cooled; then by holding the attention steady it becomes clear that ‘things’ are actually only ‘the way things appear,’ an appearance compounded by reactions and assumptions, reinforced by the resistance to change and letting go.

Ajahn Sucitto

Start over

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The very presence of your breath and of your body is one of the most astonishing things in the universe, and it offers the continual opportunity to start over. This awareness allows us to start the entire project of our life over, to reinitiate all the threads of our thought, grounding it all in the immediate experience of our body. What an incredible relief it is to understand that the ultimate place of pilgrimage is right in the center of our very own heart

Richard Freeman

Going deeper

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We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life

Jung

Lean forward

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The truth is that every fresh experience has this dizziness of freedom that we must move through. Every time we reach beyond what is familiar, there is this necessary acclimation to what is new. It is the doorway to all learning. We needn’t be afraid of it or give it too much power. We simply have to keep leaning into what we are learning.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Have wings

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Sentiments – on a very cold and wintry New Years Eve morning in Ireland – for the end of this year and the start of a new one:

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