Tag: heart

What sustains us on the way

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Mystery is not much in favor these days. The notion that there are limits to what we can do, what we can know, limits to our dominion, does not sit well with kings and queens of the hill. Humility and reverence, we hear, are the attitudes of cowards. . . . By ‘mystery’ I do not mean simply the blank places on our maps. I mean the divine source — not a void, not a darkness, but an uncapturable fullness. We are sustained by processes and powers that we can neither fathom nor do without. I speak of that ground as holy because it is ultimate, it is what makes us possible, that shapes and upholds everything we see. The stories I am most interested in hearing, reading, and telling, are those that help us imagine our lives in relation to that ground.

Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World

On a journey

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A new month. We think we know where we are going.

Surely it is better to wait and see, moment by moment. Who knows where we will end up?

Whales follow
the whale-roads.
Geese, roads of magnetized air.

Yet how often
the heart
that set out for Peru
arrives in China,

Steering hard.
consulting the charts
the whole journey.

Jane Hirshfield, China

 

Moments of orange light: An invitation to happiness

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A very grey start to the day here in Ireland …but every day we are given opportunities to collect little moments of colour that give us courage to keep going and renew happiness.

We are invited not just to live life, but to celebrate it.

The poppies send up their orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while, the roughage

shines like a miracle as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course, loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light is an invitation
to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.

Inside the bright fields, touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do —
what can you do about it —
deep, blue night?

Mary Oliver, Poppies

Sunday Quote: At home

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The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin

Parker Palmer

Simple treasures

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The little things? The little moments?

They aren’t little.  

Jon Kabat Zinn

Oh Soul,

You worry too much

Your arms are filled with treasures of all kinds

Rumi

Sightless among wonders

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A prayer, this time from the Hebrew tradition, encouraging us to embrace each moment and the “ordinary blessings” of this day:

Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, “How filled with awe is this place and we did not know it.”

Jewish Sabbath Prayer