As the wind loves to call things to dance
May your gravity be lightened by grace
John O Donohue, To Bless the Space between Us
photo ceridwen
Tag: heart
In the presence of
Joy is the meeting place of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us .. with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.
To allow our selves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well loved familiar face – I was here and you were here and together we made a world.
David Whyte , Consolations : The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Here already if only we noticed
One day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place you had lived in before you began
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise
that first set you off and drew you on
and that you were more marvelous
in your simple wish to find a way, than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach: as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city
with golden towers, and cheering crowds,
and turning the corner at what you thought was the end of the road,
you found just a simple reflection.
David Whyte, Santiago from Pilgrim: Poems
Absence
A poem for this time of year, when – with the fall of autumn leaves – it seems that letting go is the lesson we have to learn, even if we don’t want to:
May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence,
that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.
May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo.
May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere,
where the presences that have left you dwell.
May you be generous in your embrace of loss.
May the sore well of grief turn into a seamless flow of presence.
May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear from.
May you have the courage to speak for the excluded ones.
May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life.
May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words or false belonging.
May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one.
May your longing inhabit it’s dreams within the Great Belonging.
John O’Donohue, A Blessing for Absences
photo massimocuaz
Sunday Quote: Slow down
All this hurrying soon will be over.
Only when we slow down do we touch the holy.
Rainer Maria Rilke, In Praise of Mortality.
photo of Glendasan river in Wicklow by Joe King
Life passing by
Wake up my heart! The world is passing by;
Life froths and flows by, free for the asking.
Don’t sleep in your body, oblivious,
As the caravan of life goes by your house.
Rumi
Mindfulbalance 