The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking,
it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
photo of Tibetan prayer wheel, Etnografiska museum, Stockholm
A friend reminded me yesterday that it is all about starting each day anew, with fresh eyes – like lighting a candle in the darkness and seeing things in the glow of a kind light:
I’m heading into 2017 aspiring to look at life through the eyes of a child. Buddhists call it “beginner’s mind” — a corrective to the cynicism that comes when we let hard realities darken our vision and diminish our imagination. It’s a way of looking at the world that doesn’t deny the darkness, but makes fresh starts possible in everything – from our personal to our political lives.
What’s “the growing edge” in your life?
Whatever it is, may 2017 be a year in which our adult powers dance with our child-like imaginations to help make all things new.
Parker Palmer
With thanks to makebelieveboutique.com
Often the message this time of year is to completely re-shape or transform ourselves. This can sometimes mask a kind of aggression towards ourselves and suggest that most change needs to be dramatic. In most cases acceptance, integration and starting over are what is really needed :
That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.
Mark Nepo, Hearing the Cries of the World
The period between Christmas and New Year has a distinct tone and a change of rhythm. There is an intensity about the Christmas period which can stir us up; to add to this we will soon be bombarded by the messages of New Year resolutions and dramatically fixing our lives. So one or two posts about how to deal with this time, when the temptation is often to make abrupt changes in the face of the different parts of our lives.
There is a certain type of uncertainty which is just part of being human, and which we cannot control, such as that which comes from illness. This fundamental ambiguity – the unsatisfactory nature of life and of circumstances – is always there in the background. It can be accentuated at periods like Christmas, and we intensify our efforts to get solid ground. So the dilemma is how to live wholeheartedly as adults in the realization that some elements will always be displeasing and we are never fully going to get it all together. How can we hold different parts together – “manage the grey” – when we prefer things to be simply black or white:
Most of us are uncomfortable when things are undefined, when things are not clearly to or for, up or down, left or right, or right or wrong. But the deeper truths always take time to reach us, and it is our job to enter a practice of waiting openly – which involves enduring the tensions of not-knowing. The truths that matter require us not to form opinions or beliefs hastily. On the contrary, we are asked to allow time to surround us with the Wholeness of life, to take the time required for the paradox of truth to show itself. It seems that the practice of not-knowing begins with a trust in the unnameable space that holds us, in the mysterious atmosphere in which we all live. That seems to be the true space of listening and learning, where our brief experiences of life in its totality, whether harsh or calm, will not fit into our tidy little maps of perception.
Mark Nepo
The Christian calendar is quite wise in placing the feast-day of the Slaughter of the Innocents today, just immediately after the Christmas celebrations. It faces into the reality of this world, with the sad turns which we cannot understand, and the fact that we can lose that which is most important to us, due to factors which are unexpected or outside of our control. It is the opposite to the distracting tactics which we see scattered all through the modern understanding of this holiday.
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world
without being saddened very often.
Erich Fromm
photo Mstyslav Chernov
The highest goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information,
but to face our moments as sacred
Abraham Herschel
