Tag: impermanence

Hold what is asked

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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

The whispered secret

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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

Sunday quote: Transcendence

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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

Nature says, let it go

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In the Western Christian tradition,  today is the last day of the year.
It’s a gift, this cloudless November morning
warm enough for you to walk without a jacket
along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing
of your feet through fallen leaves should be
enough to quiet the mind, so it surprises you
when you catch yourself telling off your boss
for a decade of accumulated injustices,
all the things you’ve never said circling inside you.
It’s the rising wind that pulls you out of it,
and you look up to see a cloud of leaves
swirling in sunlight, flickering against the blue
and rising above the treetops, as if the whole day
were sighing, Let it go, let it go,
for this moment at least, let it all go.
Jeffrey Harrison, Enough

The blessings and the vastness

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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

Exquisitely singular

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Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute.

Don’t reject them, let them come through when they’re ready, don’t think you can plan it all out.

This day will never, no matter how long you live, happen again.

It is exquisitely singular. It will never again be exactly repeated.

Naomi Shihab Nye, I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven