Tag: heart

A new year

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The last day of the year in the Christian liturgical calendar. Advent and the preparation for Christmas starts tomorrow:

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter

Only half a circle

Karl Duffy3 Comments

 

The creator of the universe loves circles: time and space are circles, the day is a circle, the year is a circle, the earth is a circle.

But when creating and fashioning the human heart, the creator only created a half-circle, so that there is something ontologically unfinished in human nature.

The beautiful irony is that even though we’re housed in separate bodies there is a profound hidden tissue of absolute connection between us. The Celtic tradition sensed that no one lives for herself alone. Your call to discover who you are and to bring your soul into birth is also a great act of creativity toward everyone else.

John O’Donohue, The Presence of Compassion

 

It is in front of you

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Frequently on Mondays we wish we were somewhere else. We have difficulty realizing that the only moment for us to be alive is this one. We wish our lives away,  and they pass us by without us having seen the opportunity that lay in front of us.

All of our listening brings us home.  This is what the teacher-soul keeps saying to the student-self in each of us: To accept our place in the miracle before us, to listen to our experience, to our bodies, to our pain, to our wonder, to our place in the mystery, until we land and sing – this is what all birdsong calls us to remember. Try as we will to fly away, all flight leads us to land where we began, different but the same.  Try as we will to get out of here, life simply and harshly returns us to the heart of here, which, if listened to, opens us to the heart of everything. What the teacher says to the student who complains is that there is no lesson plan for living but to live. And all our dreams and plans and strategies are necessary detours to the brilliant reality of the life we already inhabit.  

Mark Nepo

In the soul

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The desire to know your own soul

will end all other desires

Rumi

Sunday Quote: More means happier

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

Went to an outlet mall in Kildare yesterday to get some bread, 30 minutes before the other stores opened. 8.30 am,  car parks already full, even buses arriving with shoppers from around the country. The modern Western tendency toward mid-winter speeding up and  shopping. An interior felt-sense of running…

Advertising finds fertile ground in the mind’s response to an underlying sense of life as unsatisfactory. Meditation is essentially training the mind to free it from the type of craving which generates stress and anxiety.

How much does a person lack in him or herself

who must have many things?

Sen no Rikyū 1522 – 1591, Japanese Zen Tea master

Bare trees

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Whoever has learned how to listen to trees
No longer wants to be a tree.
He longs to be nothing
except what he is
That is home
That is happiness
Hermann Hesse