How can we ever lose interest in life?
Spring has come again
And cherry trees bloom in the mountains.
Ryokan, 1758 – 1831, Zen monk, hermit and poet
Lift your eyes
Tag: impermanence
Intimacy with disappearance
The only choice we have, as we mature, is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous, and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearances to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully,
or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.
David Whyte, “Vulnerability” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
A change of mind
If you really want to escape the things that bother you,
what you’re needing is not to be in a different place
but to be a different person.
Seneca
Keep going
We have just passed the Spring Solstice. In Ireland this has meant more grey skies and rain than we saw in most of the Winter. Sometimes change happens out of sight and we have to keep going on trust
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun
Jack Gilbert, 1925 – 2012, American poet
The sun and the moon
Everybody has a little bit of the sun and moon in them…..We have a universe within ourselves that mimics the universe outside. None of us are just black or white, or never wrong and always right. No one. No one exists without polarities.
Everybody has good and bad forces working with them, against them, and within them.
Suzy Kassem, 1975 – American Poet, Rise Up and Salute the Sun
Allowing each and every thing
The point here is to take life in all its rich variety just as it is, with its ten thousand opposites,
and to go along with whatever circumstances require, embracing things after their own inclination or according to chance,
letting things be, rather than getting in their way, and thus allowing each and every thing, each and every appearance, to pursue a meaning and purpose distinct from my own.
Totsudo Kato, 1870 – 1949, Japanese writer
Mindfulbalance 