Tag: heart

Grounded

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:Händkakk 2014.JPG

The emphasis in working life is to get things done, get results and move things on, which can give each day a driven quality and make moment-to-moment awareness difficult. Grounding ourselves every now and then in the body and attuning simply and calmly to the breath can help us remain balanced, and allows us let go of some of the ways we can get locked into fixed positions:

May we learn to return

And rest in the beauty

Of animal being,

Learn to lean low,

Leave our locked minds,

and with freed senses

feel the earth breathing with us.

John O’Donoghue, “To Learn from Animal Being”

photo Ireen Trummer

 

Calm in the storm

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Vancouver False Creek.jpg

Some wisdom on the place of meditation and non-doing in overcoming the difficulties of each day,  from one of the Desert Fathers, 3rd Century Christian monks in Egypt

Abba Pastor said

“Any challenge that comes to you

can be overcome by silence”

photo itzafineday

Wonder and astonishment

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Violet forest flowers field.jpg

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!”

and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver

photo s04av

An Easter Sunday Quote

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Three Mile Hill, Pete Garcia (5351954513).jpg

My eyes already touch the sunny hill

going far ahead of the road I have begun

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp

It has its inner light even from a distance

and changes us even if we do not reach it

into something else, which hardly sensing it, we already are.

Rainer Maria Rilke

photo: oregon department of transportation

Where to look

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:Cross-legged(b&w).jpg

If we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, 

it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

(Si nous sommes incapables de trouver la tranquillite en nous-mêmes,

il ne sert à rien de la chercher ailleurs)

 La Rochefoucauld,

 

Birdsong on the first day of Spring

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Troglodyte-sylvain haye.jpg

I don’t know where prayers go, or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
     half-asleep in the sun?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
     growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
     along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
     of little importance, in full
self-attendance.  A condition I can’t really
     call being alive
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
     if it isn’t a prayer?

Mary Oliver, I Happened to Be Standing

photo sylvain haye