Tag: Joy

A wise not-understanding

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Flickr - Official U.S. Navy Imagery - A Sailor talks to a child during story time at Naval Base Guam..jpg

Why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own world, from the vastness of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child’s wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The intersection of two worlds

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File:Ensalada Cesar.jpg

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

Sunday Quote: Still Water

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Still Water At Dusk.jpg

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

Early morning walk

Karl Duffy2 Comments

abbey river

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

 

…and not elsewhere

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:River Barrow Towpath - geograph.org.uk - 489173.jpg

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

Sunday Quote: Spontaneity

Karl Duffy3 Comments

wild flowers 33

We need the tonic of wildness

Thoreau