A dash of foolishness

Maybe because it’s the end of the working week, or people starting on holidays, or simply because its July….. but this post follows the same theme as other Fridays in this month: Let’s keep a capacity for play and for non-doing in our lives..

Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation

in which discipline and order

are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.

May Sarton

with thanks to Ben Naga for this lovely quote

and for being one of the longest and most faithful followers of this blog.

 

Sunday Quote: A choice

We either make ourselves miserable,

or we make ourselves strong.

The amount of work is the same. 

Carlos Castenada, Journey to Ixtlan

The light is everything

The weekend, which allows the possibility to get out in nature, is a good time to share some of Mary Oliver’s poetry.  This one is about flowers and how some are less “perfect” than others. But it is also about  relationships and what hopes we have for our heart, about a greater beauty that embraces the clearly imperfect and allows us cast away the hassles of the everyday which are not us. We are nourished.

Shared moments, flowers, meanings and the stories that feed us.

What in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided–
and that one wears an orange blight–
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away–
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Mary Oliver, The Ponds

Forgiving our life

 

A lot of us find it hard to extend real kindness towards ourselves. Our default position is that we are much more critical of ourselves – and how our life history has developed – than we are of others. 

And if we forgive life for not being what we told it to be, or expected, or wished, or longed for it to be,

we forgive ourselves for not being what we might have been also.

And then we can be what we are, which is boundless

John Tarrant, The Zenosaurus Course in Koans

Sunday Quote: Stop running

Now and then it is good 

to pause in our pursuit of happiness

and simply be happy,

[De temps en temps il est bon de faire une pause dans notre quête du bonheur  et simplement être heureux]

 

Guillaume Appolinaire, 1880 – 1918

 

Not trying to get somewhere

The physical universe is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. That is to say, it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. It is best understood by the analogy with music. Because music, as an art form is essentially playful. We say, “You play the piano” You don’t work the piano.

Why? Music differs from say, travel. When you travel you are trying to get somewhere. In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition. The point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who only wrote finales.…  Same way with dancing. You don’t aim at a particular spot in the room because that’s where you will arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.

If we thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at that end, and the thing was to get to that thing at that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead.

But we missed the point the whole way along.

It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

Alan Watts