The leaves are falling, falling as from far off,
as though far gardens withered in the skies;
they are falling with denying gestures.
And in the nights the heavy earth is falling
from all the stars down into loneliness.
We are all falling. This hand falls.
And look at others; it is in them all.
And yet there is One who holds this falling
endlessly gently in his hands.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Autumn
Windowsills evenly welcome both heat and cold.
Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.
Doors are not equivocal, floorboards do not hesitate or startle.
Impatience does not stir the curtains,
a bed is neither irritable nor rapacious.
Whatever disquiet we sense in a room
we have brought there.
And so I instruct my ribs each morning,
pointing to hinge and plaster and wood —
You are matter, as they are.
See how perfectly it can be done.
Hold, one day more, what is asked.
Jane Hirshfield, A Room
An angel … embraced me
and whispered through my whole body:
“Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be.”
Tomas Tranströmer, Romanesque Arches
The start of the Advent season…
A person is not a thing or a process,
but an opening through which the absolute manifests.
Martin Heidegger
I know from personal experience how strong the habitual mind is. The discursive mind, the busy, worried, caught-up, spaced-out mind, is powerful. That’s all the more reason to d the most important thing – to realize what a strong opportunity every day is, and how easy it is to waste it. If you don’t allow your mind to open and to connect with where you are. with the immediacy of your experience, you could easily become completely submerged….you get so completely caught up in the content of your life, the minutiae that make up a day, so self-absorbed in the big project you have to do, that the blessings, the magic, the stillness and the vastness escape you.
Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
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