It is so easy to miss the tiny symbols. Finding them is quite different from the business of trying to hatch up big symbolic experiences. It is recognition, not pursuit, of meaning — recognition of the sacramental, of the intersection of the two worlds, breaking through unsought because one is attending.
Helen Luke, Jungian Therapist, Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On
photo tamorlan
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
We need the tonic of wildness
Thoreau
In almost every tradition there are tales of gods appearing in the guise of ordinary visitors. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Abraham looked up and saw three men standing near. He welcomed them, not knowing they were angels. Here Mary Oliver tells of a similar story from Ancient Greece. The key is paying attention, which allows us see the riches in everyday occurrences. In this way some people show “hospitality to angels without knowing it”
In Greece,
a long time ago,
an old couple
opened their door
to two strangers
who were,
it soon appeared,
not men at all,
but gods.
It is my favorite story –
how the old couple
had almost nothing to give
but their willingness
to be attentive –
but for this alone
the gods loved them
and blessed them –
when they rose
out of their mortal bodies,
like a million particles of water
from a fountain,
the light
swept into all the corners
of the cottage,
and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down –
but still they asked for nothing
but the difficult life
which they had already.
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.
from Mary Oliver, Mockingbirds
Mindfulbalance 