Tag: impermanence

One step at a time

Karl Duffy3 Comments

mellerey

Ideals exist in the mind, with absolutes of right and wrong, which tend to give us a sense of striving, of not being good enough  On the contrary, once we touch into the heart faculty, we connect more with the actual here and now and let go of the need to be prefect and certain. This brings about a deeper sense of balance and groundedness:

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how.

The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. 

Agnes George de Mille, American dancer and Choreographer.

When things fall apart

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pine-cone

Today is the Feast of St Martin, traditionally one of the big feasts which defined how we should work with time and the pace of our lives. It marked the start of winter and signalled a change of tempo. From tomorrow, a forty  day period of  preparation for Christmas began, a time which recommended that we should slow down, simplify our activity, reflect and see what really endures. 

Perhaps this is fitting at the end of a tumultuous and frenetic week, which caused a lot of uncertainty in many people, and made us all examine our values,  and the different solutions to being human which are being offered. We need to see what will withstand the passing of time, the passing of empires and changing human paradigms.  It reminded us to connect with a deeper wisdom in order to learn how to deal with the frequently moving and disappointing nature of life: 

Whether we’re conscious of it or not, the ground is always shifting. Nothing lasts, including us. … It’s not impermanence per se that is the cause of our suffering. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our effort to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness.

Pema Chodron, The Fundamental Ambiguity of Being Human

Learning to let go, as life passes

Karl Duffy1 Comment

What I mean to say is that you hear the Bat Kol (The Divine Voice). You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it. Even when I was healthy, I was sensitive to the process. At this stage of the game, I hear it saying, ‘Leonard, just get on with the things you have to do.’ It’s very compassionate at this stage. More than at any time of my life, I no longer have that voice that says, ‘You’re fucking up.’ That’s a tremendous blessing, really.

Leonard Cohen’s wisdom as he gets older and is more aware of his mortality

photo taken from leonardcohen.com

Always wanting more

Karl Duffy1 Comment

fallen-apples

More on the basic feeling of lack, which if we do not attend to it, makes us feel as if life is not offering us enough, or that we are not making enough of it:

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered,

‘Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived’.

Sunday Quote: Being content

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Stretching (7559234072).jpg

Contentment seems more about switching off, at source,  some of the driven aspects of our personalities,

rather than achieving that “more” which we think will fulfil them.

It is related to a quality of not-always-leaning towards something else:

A person is satisfied not by the quantity of food,

but by the absence of greed.

Gurdjieff

photo timothy krause

Halloween bonfires

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File:Solstice fire Montana.jpg

This evening marks the important Celtic feast of Samhain which starts winter and we enter the “darker half” of the year, a theme which is somewhat reflected in the celebration of Halloween. However, the ancient idea was far deeper, as we are invited to go inside and imitate the landscape in slowing down. Some element of darkness is present in all our lives. Modern society has enough elements to keep up distracted, but inevitably, from time to time, we are confronted with life’s fragility and we are invited to welcome its lessons. Moments such as these help burn away what is not essential and bring us back to our foundations. We see what really matters  and realize that searching outside of ourselves is not the way:

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,  
that for us  
as we go up in flames,

our one work is
to open ourselves, to be  
the flames?

Galway Kinnell