On the 150th anniversary of his birth:
We can make our minds so like still water
that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images,
and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life, because of our quiet.
W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight, Faerie and Folklore
photo miguel virkkunen carvalho
I am thinking, or trying to think, about all the imponderables for which we have
no answers, yet endless interest all the range of our lives,
and it’s good for the head no doubt
to undertake such meditation;
Mystery, after all, is God’s other name, and deserves our considerations surely.
But, but – excuse me now, please;
it’s morning, heavenly bright,
and my irrepressible heart begs me to hurry on into the next exquisite moment.
Mary Oliver, Trying to Be Thoughtful in the First Brights of Dawn
Meanwhile, here we are, missing the fullness of the present moment, which is where the soul resides. It’s not like you have to go someplace else to get it. So the challenge here is, Can we live this moment fully? When you ask a group of people to spend five minutes watching their own breaths moving in and out of their bodies, just as an experiment, they discover that their minds are like bubbling vats, and it’s not so easy to stay on the breath. The mind has a life of its own. It carries you away. Over a lifetime, you may wind up in the situation where you are never actually where you find yourself. You’re always someplace else, lost, in your head, and therefore in a kind of dysfunctional or nonoptimal state. Why dysfunctional? Because the only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets. You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.The past in gone, and I don’t know what’s coming in the future. It’s obvious that if I want my life to be whole, to resonate with feeling and integrity and value and health, there’s only one way I can influence the future: by owning the present.
Jon Kabat Zinn
photo kevin higgins
The main object of religion
is not to get a man into heaven
but to get heaven into him
Thomas Hardy
photo from Glendalough by katzegoesireland
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.
We are never tired,
so long as we can see far enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
photo from the top of Skellig Michael by mike shields
A post from an Irish author, to mark St Patrick’s Day
I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding
John O’Donohue
photo of Kells Bridge over the Kings River by Mike Searle
Mindfulbalance 