Tag: impermanence

Storms often lead to growth

Karl Duffy1 Comment

There can be bad weather and winds outside and similar storms and movement  in our inner life. It is good to see them in a similar way:  simply as stuff “passing through”. Sometimes, however, they can shake us out of our habitual patterns and bring us back to what is important.

When changewinds swirl through our lives, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey: that of confronting the lost and counterfeit places within us and releasing our deeper, innermost self – our true selves. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are.

Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits

They never stay

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The bad weather this past week has meant that the blossoms on the cherry tree in the garden have all been blown away. Cherry blossoms have long been a symbol for transience and the the ephemeral nature of life, so I suppose they are even more so this year:

Nothing in the world
is usual today.
This is the first morning.

Come quickly –  as soon as
these blossoms open, they fall.
This world exists as a sheen of dew on flowers.

Izumi Shikibu,  10th Century Japanese poetess.

We usually take ourselves to be the sum of these thoughts, ideas, emotions and body sensations, but there is nothing solid to them. How can we claim to be our thoughts or opinions or emotions or body when they never stay the same?

Jack Kornfield

This will never come again

Karl Duffy2 Comments
That it will never come again, Is what makes life so sweet. Emily Dickenson

What exactly is Emily Dickenson writing about. She’s writing about just this.  This wonderful, clear, bright, blue day. It won’t come again. There will be other, very similar days, no doubt. But this day will not return. And you sitting here reading this, you will not sit down in this same way, with these same thoughts and feelings. None of this will be the same again. Even as you set down this book and leave the room, you’ll not be the person who walked in. This will never come again. This is always the case. That this will never come again is what it actually means to be born again and again. We and indeed the whole world are born repeatedly, over and over, in each new moment…What makes human life – which is inseparable from this moment – so precious, is its fleeting nature.

Steve Hagan, Buddhism is Not what You Think

Photo : Assisi, Early Morning, Easter

One time, one meeting

Karl Duffy4 Comments

There is a phrase which is associated  with the Japanese tea ceremony  –  Ichigo ichie  – which means something like “one time, one encounter.” . It is a nice motto to take for today. It reminds us to treasure every moment, because each moment and each  meeting will happen only once and never recur again. So whether having a simple cup of tea or coffee, or meeting someone we know well, or going a familiar way,  let us try to keep the phrase in mind. We will not pass this way again.


Trusting even when we cannot see

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Both winter and spring are part of what’s true as are summer and autumn in their turn. In welcoming awakening’s seasonal transformations, we discover a greater truth that shows us a new way of trusting the very change that we once thought a problem. Awakening has its ebbs and flows. People get discouraged when nothing seems to be happening in their spiritual life. But because something isn’t apparent in our conscious awareness doesn’t mean that it’s not happening at all. When the field appears fallow, we can learn to trust what’s going on underground, in the dark, invisible to us. In fact, it’s essential that along with the lightning comes the quiet dark, when radiant bursts are taken in and made part of the whole. To agree to all the seasons and tides of awakening means that we are always walking the Way: while there are times we won’t understand, there are no detours, no causes for disappointment. Thouhg sometimes obscured by clouds, there is only the rising dawn, long and slow, that we walk within. 

Joan Sutherland, Seasons of Awakening

What happens when we get blocked….

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No matter how much we practice, when the going gets rough or we’re in a tight spot, when you’re in that [tight] place, as far as I’m concerned, that is the main place that all the … teachings are pointing to. You could say they’re pointing to full, complete awakening — and that would be true— but the moment of truth is when we’re caught in an habitual way and we just do the habitual thing. The main thing is how we talk to ourselves at that point. I know that one of the main story lines is: “I’m not good enough,” in some kind of form. And we get hooked by something along those lines. 

If at that point, you could just say to yourself, “This is a familiar moment, this is just a common, ordinary occurrence in everyday life, and the choice is mine, again and again and again. And I’ll get plenty of opportunities to work with this. I don’t have to get it right this time. Do I want to proceed with a blocked, frozen life force or do I want to experience it [as] free-flowing?” Do we want to block the possibility of our human life, the creative, life force, the basic energy of our being, which has the potential, when fully recognized and fully experienced, is the experience of full awakening — complete open heart, complete open mind to everything.  Do we want to have access to that in this very brief human life that we have? It’s so short, and the whole thing, from the moment we’re born until we die, is like a chance that we’re given to either unblock ourselves or block ourselves further.

Pema Chodron