Tag: heart

Making Space

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The life that we have in our mind, the life that is a reflection of our planning, the life that has been constructed out of bits and pieces in our environment — external conditioning, things we have observed in other people, things that influential people have told us — is actually not who we are. Life emerges out of the silence of our inner being. When I was in graduate school I worked with a Jungian analyst, June Singer. She used to say, “Work expands to fill all of the available space.” The problem is not the amount of things you have in your life, it’s the attitude. It’s your fear of space.

Reginald Ray, Busyness is laziness

Declutter

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The art of cleaning is a simple spiritual activity that is often overlooked. The image of the monk sweeping the courtyard has a deep significance, because without the practice of cleaning there can be no empty space, no space for a deep communion with the sacred. Outer and inner cleaning belong to the foundation of spiritual practice, and as the monk’s broom touches the ground, it has a particular relationship to the Earth. We need to create a sacred space in order to live in relationship to the sacred within ourselves and within creation.

Our present culture teaches us to accumulate, but not how to make empty. But for real spiritual work in the inner and outer worlds, in order to give space to the divine, in order to return to the sacred, we need to practice a certain purification in our daily lives. We learn to eat consciously, to be attentive to our outer environment, to sweep our courtyard. We also need to learn how to clean our house, both physically and inwardly. Just as we need to learn to empty our mind in meditation, to clear away the clutter of unnecessary thoughts, so do we need to consciously clean our living space.  

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Art of Cleaning

A hunger for eternity

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Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

Mary Oliver, Upstream

Turning up for your life

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You will never be able to experience everything.

So please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

Camus

Small forgotten miracles

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“It is believed that the onion originally came from India. 
In Egypt it was an object of worship — why I haven’t been able to find out. From Egypt the onion entered Greece and on to Italy, thence into all of Europe.” 
Better Living Cookbook 
 

When I think how far the onion has traveled
just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise
all small forgotten miracles,
crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,
pearly layers in smooth agreement,
the way the knife enters onion
and onion falls apart on the chopping block,
a history revealed.
And I would never scold the onion
for causing tears.
It is right that tears fall
for something small and forgotten.
How at meal, we sit to eat,
commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma
but never on the translucence of onion,
now limp, now divided,
or its traditionally honorable career:
For the sake of others,
disappear.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Living in our heads

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The Pueblo Indian told me that all Americans were always uneasy and restless, “We do not understand them. We think that they are mad” Of course I was somewhat astonished and asked them why. They said – Well, ‘They say that they think with their heads . . . . We think here,’ he said, indicating his heart“

Carl Jung, on his encounter with a Native American elder he met in New Mexico in 1925