The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life
because it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,
from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search,
from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.
Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out
Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key?
Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go...
Letting things happen naturally is terribly difficult, almost ridiculously difficult, but it’s the only way. I used to worry too much in the past, it seemed I couldn’t let go of what was destined to be lost – …like holding a kitten too tightly or a flower that wilts if gripped too firmly” .
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Every stretch of time, whether an inch or a foot, is priceless. Life is made of these units, and each is an opportunity for mindfulness.
Not twice this day
Inch time, foot gem.
This day will not come again.
Each minute is worth a priceless gem.
Response of Takuan, 1573 – 1645, Zen teacher, when asked by a lord who asked how should we “pass the time.”
Summer Solstice
The person sees the morning as the beginning of a new day; takes germination as the start in the life of a plant, and withering as its end.
But this is nothing more than biased judgment on his part.
Nature is one.
There is no starting point or destination, only an unending flux, a continuous metamorphosis of all things.
Masanobu Fukuoka, 1913 – 2008, Japanese farmer and philosopher
Silence is fruitful only when it leads to interior peace and stillness.
Contemplation is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
You do not find it by travelling, but by standing still.
Thomas Merton
We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment, qualities which are a central, and abiding dynamic of its presence,
but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’ is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a full union with the world.
The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the career counsellor’s central surprise, the biographer’s conundrum, an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a continual unstoppable flow, an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart and leave;
a pilgrim suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who is willing to fail, often spectacularly, at their own life rather than succeed drably, at someone else’s
David Whyte
Mindfulbalance 