We do not remember days,
We remember moments
Cesare Pavese 1908 – 1950 Italian poet and novelist
Tag: Joy
Choosing light …and life
Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, when the sun delivers the fewest hours of sunlight. I have posted on it in different ways over the years, sometimes encouraging the balance of light and dark in our lives, but today I will do as the ancient Celts did, and remind myself of the victory of light and life, not letting darkness have the last word:
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.
Mary Oliver, Moments
photo mike
Why it is not always good to be so responsible
This is the irrational season
when love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
there’d have been no room for the child
Madeleine L’Engle, 1918 – 2007, American author
On being amazing and perfect
When entering a supermarket store on Saturday I was greeted with a banner telling me that shopping there would make this Christmas “the most perfect ever”. This desire for perfect conditions is necessary when we are young, in order to allow the development of a stable self. As the English psychoanalyst Winnicott said, “the mind has a root in the need of the individual, at the core of the self, for a perfect environment”. However, as the child grows, its capacity to live with a less than perfect environment develops and the mother just has to be “good enough” in an ongoing committed relationship rather than being perfect in every instance. And it is the same for us as adults.
Our lives are always a work in progress, with moments of failing followed by repairing, integration mixed with disintegration. Despite what we sometimes think and express from time to time, we don’t really need perfection. We push ourselves hard enough due to that false belief. That things go wrong – despite our best efforts – is just part of the human condition. What we really want is to be seen as we are – not completely sorted out – and for that to be good enough.
It’s odd in a way, this business of Perfect Christmasses. The story of the first Christmas is the story of a series of completely unplanned, messy events – a surprise pregnancy, an unexpected journey that’s got to be made, a complete muddle over the hotel accommodation when you get there… Not exactly a perfect holiday.
But it tells us something really vital. We try to plan all this stuff and stay in charge, and too often (especially with advertisers singing in our ears the whole time) we think that unless we can cook the perfect dinner, organise the perfect Christmas, we somehow don’t really count or we can’t hold our heads up. But in the complete mess of the first Christmas, God says, ‘Don’t worry – I’m not going to wait until you’ve got everything sorted out perfectly before I get involved with you. I’m already there for you in the middle of it all, and if you just let yourself lean on me a bit instead of trying to make yourself and everything around you perfect by your own efforts, everyone will feel a little more of my love flowing’.
Archbishop of Canterbury, Pause for Thought, BBC Radio 2.
The sun and the moon and the stars
From the 17th to the 23rd of December a special sequence of invocations have been used since at least the 5th Century. Today’s one – “O Wisdom, Come to teach us the way of prudence” – reflects the age-old quest for a balanced way of being, that will lead to our hearts being fulfilled, faced with all the demands on our time.
Every day we bump into things that challenge us to keep our hearts soft when fears and disappointments try to convince us to harden and close down. The temptation is to say “What can we do? It is as it is” . However, this never-ending wisdom practice consists in keeping open to experience in all its changing forms – its joys and its sorrows – having the courage to meet whatever comes our way with a spacious heart. We dare to believe in the underlying mystery, behind the busyness of the day. Things may change, the attitude of the heart doesn’t:
The water in the stream may have changed many times,
but the reflection of the moon and the stars remains the same.
Rumi
More fun
I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
photo Barney Moss
Mindfulbalance 