Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Manon, Ballerina
A season or an hour of the day is a visitation whose return is not always assured. Every spring following a long winter feels as miraculous as if we are seeing it for the first time. Out of the dead garden rises abundance beyond a winter eye’s comprehension…..To make friends with the hours is to come to know all the hidden correspondences inside our own bodies that match the richness and movement of life we see around us.
David Whyte, Time is a Season
The first day of Spring in the Celtic Calendar, the important feast of Imbolc, halfway between solstices, with themes of light and fertility, hidden seeds and new life.
Lord, the air smells good today, straight from the mysteries
within the inner courts of God.
A grace like new clothes thrown across the garden,
free medicine for everybody.
The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise.
Rumi
Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.
Pema Chodron
When Zen Master Joshu was a young monk he asked his teacher Nansen, “What is the Way?” His teacher replied “Your Ordinary Mind is the Way”. By “ordinary” Nansen meant the mind Joshu already had; he didn’t need to turn it, or himself, into something else. He didn’t need to put, as the Zen saying goes, another head on top of the one he already had.
Unfortunately, these days, when we hear the word ordinary, we are inclined to think it means “average or typical” or even “mediocre”. We contrast ordinary with special, and decide, given the choice, we rather be special. But our practice wont make us special; it will keep bringing us back to who we already are.
Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness
Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.
Haruki Murakami
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