It’s important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don’t necessarily nurture the soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and any animal’s rhythm of rest and activity.
Thomas Moore
A beautiful quote from the Buddha on how to develop our heart and move it towards happiness. We let go of the past’s hurts and our worries about the future by staying in the present. Then we hold whatever is happening within us, in awareness, without getting hooked by it or identifying with it. Mindfulness is really re-mindfulness, remembering to come back, non-judgmentally, to the here-and-now. It allows us work with the inner fabric of what is happening in our heart and mind at this very moment.
You shouldn’t chase after the past
or place expectations on the future.
What is past is left behind.
The future is as yet unreached.
Whatever quality is present
you clearly see, right there,
right there.
Not taken in; unshaken.
That’s how you develop the heart.
Bhaddekaratta Sutta
Had a conversation this week which reminded me that not everything works out the way that we anticipate or wish. Life rarely proceeds so smoothly that we maintain the pure clarity or carefree existence which we glimpsed at times when we were children. It is much more complex – a succession of ebbs and flows, of good moments and bad, of integrity and mixed motives. In later life, the challenge is more that we reconcile the opposites that have emerged within us – the Shadow and the light, the steps forward with the setbacks – and transform them into a wholeness which allows us fully move on in the project which is our life. At times, however, it can be hard to see a positive direction in where we currently are, as the maps and guidelines which had guided us up to now seem hopelessly inadequate. A new paradigm is needed. We are forced to acknowledge the mystery and work out a path on our own, moving into a larger life and not the one we unconsciously thought had been mapped out for us.
Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!
And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.
Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.
Mary Oliver, Halleluiah.
Have posted this poem before, but I saw this bird – the American Northern Cardinal – for the first time last week. Although, unlike Mary Oliver, I did not hear it sing, its bright colour still taught something about life, the heart, and the relationship between the body and the mind .
And this was my true task, to be the
music of the body.
Do you understand? for truly the body needs a song, a spirit, a soul.
And no less, to make this work,
the soul has need of a body,
and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable beauty of heaven where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,
and this is why I have been sent,
to teach this to your heart.
Mary Oliver, Red Bird
The beauty even in the most ordinary.
Wonder even in the most commonplace:
Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it
and whispers, “Grow, grow”.
The Talmud
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion.
T.S. Eliot, East Coker
