Today, let this light bless you
With these friends let it bless you
With snow-scent and lavender bless you
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days
Jane Hirshfield, A Blessing for a Wedding
Enjoying each moment to its fullness, without binding ourselves to how it is, or to our thoughts as to how it “should” be…
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise
William Blake, Eternity
Can we simply allow ourselves to feel happy, no matter what the changing circumstances in our life look like…
When we realize the everlasting truth
of “everything changes”
and find our composure in it,
we find ourselves in Nirvana.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen MInd, Beginners Mind
When you start tuning in to winter, you realise that we live through a thousand winters in our lives – some big, some small… Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them. […] To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical.
Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
The wise person does not grieve for the things which they do not have,
but rejoices in those which they do have.
Epictetus, died 135 AD, Greek Stoic philosopher
Do we relate to our circumstances with bitterness or with openness?
This is our choice in every moment
Pema Chodron
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