Tag: heart

It’s another Monday

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The mind is constantly making judgments about ourselves, others, or how this day is going to be. Better to stick with the moment-to-moment experience, and avoid coming to conclusions before they happen.

Our daily world is commonly held in terms of non-specific generalizations, like its ‘another Monday,’ or, ‘a typical man’, or ,‘I dread meeting Janice, she’s always like this,’ or ‘I’m hopeless.’ In fact ……. any sense of a lasting entity or state of being is an act of generalization. It’s a useful convention, but one that allows the mind’s neuroses and corruptions to be projected onto the here and now.

Ajahn Sucitto, The Low Point

Sunday Quote: A deep yearning

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Advent starts today, the period of looking forward to Christmas, but more deeply, it is a good season to look at desire and longing. There is a type of hole at the heart of human subjectivity, which gives rise to a perpetual cause of desire. In traditions,  both East and West,  it is understood that this desire, this restlessness or emptiness, will never go away. Indeed, it the this emptiness which gives rise to a longing that takes us beyond ourselves.  Advertisers try to lure us into the belief that we can make this longing go away, encouraging us to think that once we we get this thing or feeling we will be at rest.  

Dear soul, if you were not friends
with the vast nothing inside,
why would you always be casting your net
into it, and waiting so patiently?

Rumi

A new year

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

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

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

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

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

The desire to know your own soul

will end all other desires

Rumi