The storm passed over Ireland yesterday, blowing down trees, cutting power and diverting plans. How easy it is to be blown off course.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
Wendell Berry
In Ireland, a once-in-a-lifetime storm is forecast to pass over today, with extreme winds and heavy rain. Schools and workplaces are closed.
What in your life is calling you
When all the noise is silenced,
The meetings adjourned….
The lists laid aside,
and the wild iris blooms
by itself in the dark forest
What still pulls on your soul?
Rumi
The leaves are falling, falling as from far,
from wilting in the heavens’ distant gardens:
They’re falling to deny the summer’s mirth.
And in the nights the heavy Earth
falls into solitude from star to star.
We all are falling. See my hand: it is falling.
And look at others: It’s in all their calling.
And yet there’s One, who’s holding all this falling,
with endless tenderness, in His upturned hands.
Rilke, Autumn
Things are continually changing and change in ways that we do not expect. The human tendency is to fix ourselves and each moment into something expected and define it by how it has to be, rather than how it is evolving. The great adventure is to live each moment fully, as a gift which has arrived without us expecting it.
A person who has clarified their real state sees only
each thing,
each thing,
each thing,
and lets go of understanding an underlying nature for each thing.
Dogen, Uji
To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, and support. Life and death are connected by vulnerability. The newborn child and the dying elder both remind us of the preciousness of our lives. Let’s not forget the preciousness and vulnerability of life.
Henri Nouwen
Today is the feastday of St Francis of Assisi (1182 – 1226), a town I visited just a month ago, so a story from his life about working with difficult emotions.
We are told that there was a wolf terrorizing the town of Gubbio, attacking and killing several people. The townsfolk locked their doors, afraid to leave their homes. Francis heard about this and went to Gubbio . When he came upon the wolf, it lunged at him, about to bite. Francis stood calmly and greeted the wolf, calling him “Brother Wolf” and told it not to harm him. The wolf stopped and lay down at his feet. Then Francis and the wolf made a deal: the town would provide food for the wolf for the rest of its life, in exchange for the wolf’s ceasing to attack. We are told the wolf placed its right paw into Francis’ hand, and lived in peace with the people of Gubbio for the rest of its life.
These legends speak to the different parts of our lives. We all have many fears that push us to close our doors and withdraw. And we have emotions that arise within us and scare us, like anger, jealousy and the stuff that relationships bring up in our lives. Our normal first response is to be disturbed or frightened by these strong emotions and we move to push them away. However, in themselves, these are not the problem, but it is our mind’s relationship to them that is. So what we learn from Francis is to approach the things that frighten us – the frightening wolves within us – by looking at them directly, as if they are part of the family – “brother wolf”, “brother anger” “brother fear” – and welcome them to the table. This is the practice: to first experience the anxiety as an embodied feeling, with no shoulds or shouldn’ts about it. Our fears do not need to become a moment for showing ourselves further violence.
Mindfulbalance 