Saying yes to everything in a day, including things we would prefer not to be happening, is not easy, but it helps us remember that life is made up of both pleasant and unpleasant:
Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water —
not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,
but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.
Jane Hirshfield, A Cedary Fragance from Given Sugar, Given Salt
If you must look back, do so forgivingly
If you must look forward, do so prayerfully
However, the wisest thing you can do
is to be present in the present….
gratefully.
Maya Angelou
photo don toofee
We are asked to live in companionship with patterns and dynamics that are either disappearing, have not fully emerged or can never be fully named;
patterns perhaps already changing into forms for which we have yet no language.
It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances
as much as by gifted appearances,
allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living
David Whyte, The Poetic Narrative of our Times
In a dark time, the eye begins to see
Roethke, In a Dark Time
A day like Good Friday bears witness to a truth that runs through all the different wisdom traditions, namely, that the times when we are challenged and hurt are often the moments when we grow the most. Thus places of darkness are difficult and fruitful at the same time. This truth needs to be remembered in a culture that focuses on perpetual youth, continual progress and ongoing self-improvement: :
Life may be brimming over with experiences,
but somewhere, deep inside,
all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go.
Etty Hillesum
photo mark 10:43
The art of life is a constant adjustment to our surroundings
Okakura Kakuzo, 1862 – 1913, Japanese scholar and writer
photo Evelyn Simak
Staying solidly rooted in the here and now, and in the body, like a mountain, and not in the storylines in our heads about our life and about others:
When you look at experience directly, it’s obvious that all we are or have is happening right now. Our memories happen now, and the results of what we’ve been involved with happen now. Our project scenarios for the future happen now and our actions – whose consequences may happen in the future – happen now. Furthermore, our awareness of this state of affairs, feelings about and responses to all that – happen now.
And yet there is a current in the mind that creates a felt identity who was, is and will be. Rolling on its surface are worries and expectations about what I will be, regret about what I was. An idea may form: “Having been this, surely I deserve to become that”; or its negative form ” I’ve never been this, so I’ll never become one of those”. There’s a lot of drama and suffering and stress in this flood….
Since I only have pictures of what I was, and stories of what I might or will be, can I be clear as to who I am now?
When we give full attention to the present – in the focus that should surely give us the clearest, most stable impression of who we are – we find that the images break up, like reflections in a stream poked with a finger. And as those images break up, all the weight, the need, the anxiety, suddenly sinks with no footing.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami: Ways to Cross Life’s Floods
photo chi king
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