Tag: heart

The direction of life

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“I’ve known rivers,” writes Langston Hughes. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers“.

Am I going to flow with my river nature today, or am I going to swim against it? this is what I ask myself when I get out of bed each morning. And when I go to sleep, I apologize to the river gods for any hard strokes I made against the current, and for splashing about like a drowning person. I pray that tomorrow I may once again know the pleasure of following my soul downstream, because I’ve known rivers- and once we’ve known rivers, once we have stretched out on the dark waters, trusting the river gods, going in the direction of life even if it is headfirst toward the rapids – we want to taste that water again;

we want our souls to grow deep like the rivers again.

Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How difficult times can help us grow

Worry

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I worried a lot.

Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?


Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

Mary Oliver, I Worried

A wise metaphor

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“Seasons” is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think.

It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all — and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.

Parker Palmer, From Language to Life

Autumn

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And to die, 

which is letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,

is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvellously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.

Rilke

All flows through us

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The sublime peace of the Tao [is] something we can all experience by . . . coming into accord with how things actually are—what Tibetan Buddhists call the natural state. Rather than trying to build skyscrapers to reach heaven and bridges to cross the raging river of samsara to reach the so-called other shore of nirvana, we could realize that it all flows right through us right now and there’s nowhere to go, nothing to get, and all is perfect as it is. This deep inner knowing has a lot to do with trust and letting be; there is nirvanic peace in things just as they are.

Lama Surya Das in Derek Lin, Tao Te Ching: Annotated and Explained 

Never imitate

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Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation;

but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

Ralph Waldo Emerson