Life has told me that it knows better plans than we can imagine,
so that I try to submerge my own desires…into a calm willingness
to accept whatever comes,
to make the most of it,
then wait again.
Julia Seton, By a Thousand Fires:
Nature notes and extracts from the life and unpublished journals of Ernest Thompson Seton
In the course of a day, certain events or how people behave can annoy or disturb us, leading us to consider them as “enemies”, working against our happiness. However, as the Buddha reminds us, it is not the things in themselves which are the problem, but how we react to them:
Your worst enemy can not harm you
as much as your own unfiltered thoughts.
Dhammapada, ch. 3
photo mike peel
February has begun rainy and very wild and windy here in Ireland. I am reminded of how Ryokan worked with the mental energies, thoughts, feelings and moods which passed through his body-mind. We can learn a lot from these monks on how to work in a practical way with our daily experience:
Not being so attached to our facts, or even our “alternative facts”, and how to let go of certain types of thoughts which are just not important.
If someone asks about
the mind of this monk,
say it is no more than a passage of wind
in the vast sky.
Ryokan, 1758 – 1831, Buddhist monk, hermit and poet.
In the old Celtic/Gaelic calendar February 1st is the start of Spring, which, in the very mild winter we are having this year, seems right. It was the Celtic feast of Imbolc, falling midway between the winter and spring solstices, a celebration of fertility and growth involving the lighting of fires. In the Christian calendar this became Lá Fhéile Bríde, St Brigid’s Day, and maintained some of the same fertility themes in the folk traditions. Similarly today, the feast of Candlemas, saw the blessing of candles for use in the home. It would seem that there was a need for people to remind themselves of warmth and light at this halfway point, as a reminder that new growth will soon be here.
At different times, I too find myself at midway points, not quite sure where I am arriving, but too far away from where I started from to recognize it and go back. We have no overall map for this journey; we may not even have a candle, lose our sense of direction and easily get lost. As Dante found, it’s as if we are “midway in this way of life we’re bound upon …. in a dark wood, where the right road was wholly lost and gone”. The trick may be to work with the experience of being lost without believing the story that we actually are, not letting “how I feel” become the story of “who I am”. This keeps our energy joyful on the journey, not hooked by stories of where we should be.
Things are always in transition if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we would like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just keep moving.
Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Hard times.
A new month.
A lot of anxiety and dysfunction all around. The challenge: Not to be a victim of the frantic world in which we live in, or of the way in which our nervous systems respond.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
The most important thing, in the show of the temporal and the transient,
is to recognize the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present.
Hegel, Works, VII, 17.
photo matt jigins
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