Tag: impermanence

Trust a natural rhythm

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We already know how to let go – we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.

Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

Sunday Quote: Lifted

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Be helpless, dumbfounded,

Unable to say yes or no,

Then a stretcher will come from grace

to gather us up.

Rumi

All this falling

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As I walk through the woods along the lake, I’m quickened by nature’s palette of subtle and vivid colors. At the same time — as the leaves drop and the dark skeletons of the trees begin to emerge — I’m sobered by the fact that all green, growing, and glorious things must pass away.

And yet, as the years go by, the more I find that these two feelings dance with each other. The fact that all things must die makes me ever more grateful for the beauties of nature and human nature.

If we let that gratitude animate us to care for the natural and human communities, then what falls to the ground around us and among us will seed the flowering of new life.

As Rilke says in this lovely and well-known poem, “…there is Someone, whose hands, infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.”

We are that Someone’s hands. Let’s hold all this falling in ways that will help the earth and its creatures rise…

Parker J. Palmer

This is life

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This then is life.
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.
How Curious! How real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.

Walt Whitman

The river will flow

Karl Duffy2 Comments

When we fall utterly, something gathers us up. But our falling must be without reservation, without expectation, without hope, though not hopeless. You can’t plan that kind of falling. When you abandon yourself utterly to life, the river will flow, and the log jam will free. Impossible is another word for grace. Who would’ve thought it, life takes another turn, and you are gathered up into a whole different way of seeing and being.

Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life

Ten thousand opposites

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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.

Katō Totsudō 1870 – 1949, Japanese writer