Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you. Rumi
It is a bewildering thing in human life, that the thing that causes the greatest fear is the source of the greatest wisdom. Jung
Tag: heart
Making barren places fruitful with kindness
When we consider that Helen Keller was blind and deaf, her words on how to make the most of life are reminders to all of us to look beyond the difficulties that come our way each day. Her focus was on what she could do for others and on not what the thoughts in her mind or others’ minds said she could not do.
Join the great company of those who make the barren places of life fruitful with kindness. Your success and happiness lie within you. External conditions are the accidents of life, its outer wrappings. The great, enduring realities are love and service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulty.
Helen Keller
Sunday Quote
Try it today:
One kind word can warm three winter months
Japanese Proverb
Little acts of kindness
Life is so difficult, how can we be anything but kind?
Sylvia Boornstein, Happiness is an Inside Job
Each day there are innumerable moments when we have the possibility to be kind or helpful to one another. We can choose not to. However, it seems to me that much of life is made up of innumerable little occasions like this.
We can wait around to do something big with our life. Or we can do the little things that are presented each day.
The purpose of human life, why we survive, why we live, is to give happiness to [others]. Even if we cannot do everything now, just to stop one problem of another person is worthwhile.Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche
Stillness of the heron
Judith sent me this beautiful poem, by a Canadian poet. Again, the action of a heron – this time its almost “monastic” stillness – confronts the poet and prompts reflections on how some moments contain everything:
A hunched grey shape
framed by leaves
with lake water behind
standing on our
little point of land
like a small monk
in a green monastery
meditating
almost sculpture
except that it’s alive
brooding immobile permanent
for half an hour
a blue heron
and it occurs to me
that if I were to die at this moment
that picture would accompany me
wherever I am going
for part of the way
Al Purdy, The last picture in the world
Finding our own depths
Last week, walking, I was startled by a heron taking off. This beautiful large bird rose up with very graceful slow beats of its wings, its long neck folded into a “s” shape, and flew away, letting out a loud squawk as it got further away. I looked after this bird as it vanished into the distance, leaving silence behind. Normally herons do not draw much attention to themselves, as they stand, solitary and still, for hours in fields or water, waiting to catch a frog or fish.
Because of this, for the ancient Celts the heron symbolized independence, patience and intelligence. They saw them as special creatures, who dwelt between the different realms of land, water and sky. Maybe because of its solitary nature, the heron was also seen as a messenger from the gods. And moments when we come accross the beauty of nature close up often feel like blessed moments, especially as we stand in the silence looking after them.
I admire the heron’s capacity to stand still, to stay focused, to draw on inner resources. It reminds me to trust myself, to nurture my own roots, ones that nothing and nobody can take away. I do not need to “produce” something in order to be happy. Looking at it standing there prompts me to see that I have a responsibility to befriend myself first of all, to be be comfortable my own solitude before any interactions with others and with the world. I see that I need to deconnect more, to quieten the noise, to simplify this increasingly complicated life, and resist the truth advanced today that being always connected means being more fruitful.
It is only from this place of solitude, from having our own wells, that we can really listen to others and relate to their deepest needs. As Mary Oliver reflected when she saw a heron rise up, new life rises up from the depths of the dark pools in which we stand. We have to descend before we can arise.
So heavy is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings
open
and she turns from the thick water,
from the black sticks
of the summer pond,
and slowly rises into the air
and is gone.
Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think how unlikely it is
that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed
back into itself–
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle, the fallen gate.
And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miracle
but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body
into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.
Mary Oliver, Heron rises from the Dark Summer Pond
Mindfulbalance 