You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us
photo joseph Mischyshyn
Nothing we see or hear is perfect.
But right there in the imperfection
is perfect reality
Shunryu Suzuki-roshi
That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning.
“Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings
photo of Bantry bay, philip Halling
I spent yesterday morning in the lovely retreat house at the Tearmann Spirituality Center in Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, with the MBSR group I am currently working with. A quiet morning of sitting meditation and walking, and space in the wide expanses of the mountains and the forest. We tend to get consumed by the activities we do, the words we say, the thoughts we think, and the things we have. Our minds get drawn there, and not to the spaces before and after that hold them. What if the gaps were more important? What if we practiced focusing more on the spaces around moments, nurturing them and making wider the gaps within and without? These are the home of the spirit. They nourish us, widening the heart and giving life.
Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — universe.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
photo, Glendalough, pixie from he
We just need to remember to practice relaxing into our life, in all its joys and sorrows, and to relinquish the need to know what’s going to happen next. The third element of patience is acceptance of the truth, meaning that we accept our experience as it is – with all its suffering – rather than how we want it to be. We recognize that because our experience is continually changing, we don’t need it to be different than it is. This acceptance of “things as they are” requires profound wisdom and compassion, which takes a long time to evolve; we must therefore develop a long-enduring mind that will enable us to understand time from a radically new perspective.
Michele McDonald, Finding Patience
William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned
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