Tag: heart

Here

Karl Duffy3 Comments

It is not an easy or automatic thing to be fully at ease in the place or moment we are in our lives….

My favorite poem from David Wagoner is “Lost” :

Stand still, the trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.

The truth of this poem is an old truth. There are the places you wish to go, there are the places you desperately wish you never left, there are the places you imagine you should be, and there is the place called here. In the world of Wagoner’s poem, it is the rooted things – trees and bushes – that tell the truth to the person who is lost, the person with legs and fear who wishes to be elsewhere. The person must stand still, feel their body on the ground where they are, in order to learn the wisdom. This is not easy wisdom, it is frightening wisdom. 

In Irish, there is a phrase “ar eagla na heaglab” that translates as “for fear of fear.” It is true that there are some things that we fear, but that there is, even deeper, a fear of fear. So we are prevented from being here not only by being frightened of certain places but by the fear of being frightened of certain places. So “stand still” the poet advises. Learn from the things that are already in the place where you wish you were not.

Hello to the fear of fear
Hello to here ..


Padraig O’Tuama, in his lovely book, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

Sunday Quote: Wholeness

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Non est vivere, sed valere vita est

Life is not just a matter of being alive, but living well

Martial, Roman Poet, c 40 – 102 AD, Epigrams Book VI, 70:15)

Our chance selves

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For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance.

We ride the wave and are
the wave.

And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.

William Stafford

Restless ambition

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or, in Ireland’s case these days, a lot of rain….

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,

I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

Mary Oliver, Black Oaks

Overthinking

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It is imperative to cut off the mind road.

If you do not cut off the mind road, you will be a ghost, clinging to the grass.

Wu Men Hui-k’ai,, 1183–1260, Chinese Chán master

Don’t give your power away

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I think of the past twenty years,
when I used to walk home quietly
from Kuo-ch’ing,

All the people in the Kuo-ch’ing monastery –
would say, “Hanshan is an idiot.”

“Am I really an idiot:” I reflected.
But my reflections failed to solve the question:
for I myself do not know who the self is,
So how can others know who I am?

Hanshan,  9th century, Chinese Buddhist/Taoist poet