Tag: impermanence

There are no wrong seasons.

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It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard…

 I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that…

 But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms.

For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

Mary Oliver, Hurricane (excerpts)

Applying the lessons of autumn

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We all carry these interior lists and shoulds…

Dropping all we carry – all our preconceptions, our interior lists of the ways we’ve failed and the ways we’ve been wronged, all the secret burdens we work at maintaining – dropping all regret and expectations lets our mentality die. Dropping all we have constructed as imperative allows us to be born again into the simplicity of spirit that arises from unencumbered being

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

 

As is

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My daughter, Gina, and I like to shop in consignment stores for vintage clothing. There are great finds in such shops, a silk paisley scarf, a retro leather jacket, sequined heels. Many of the clothes have a small stain, a missing button or a slight tear in the fabric. I noticed in one store, all the clothes carried a cardboard tag with the price and the disclaimer “As Is” 

I like these tags. I think we should hang them on ourselves and each other like Christmas tree ornaments. What a beautiful gift to accept ourselves, others and our circumstances “As Is”, with all the beauty, imperfections and challenges that make up this very human life of ours.

Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

Monday mornings

Karl Duffy2 Comments

 

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering,

it doesn’t mean that something is wrong.

What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth.

Suffering is part of life,

and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move.

 Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart, Heart Advice for Hard Times

Sunday Quote: Being comfortable with change

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Apprentice yourself to the curve of your own disappearance

David Whyte

Everything moves on

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The autumn equinox arrives at 9:54 PM on Saturday, September 22, officially marking the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere…..

Another year gone, leaving everywhere its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

– the uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing to stay — how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever in these momentary pastures

Mary Oliver, Fall Song