Tag: Joy

Being happy today 1: Joyfulness is in our own hands

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Joy isn’t dependent on getting things, or on the world going the way you want, or on people behaving the way they should, or on their giving you all the things you like and want. Joyfulness isn’t dependent upon anything but your own willingness to be generous, kind, and loving. It’s that mature experience of giving, sharing, and developing the science of goodness. Virtuousness is the joy we can experience in this human realm. So, although what society is doing or what everyone else is doing is beyond my control -I can’t go around making everything how I want it – still, I can be kind, generous, and patient,and do good, and develop virtue. That I can do, and that’s worth doing, and not something anyone can stop me from doing.  However rotten or corrupted society is doesn’t make any difference to our ability to be virtuous and to do good.

Ajahn Sumedho

Being happy today 2: Finding joy today and everyday

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Look at everything
as though you were seeing it
either for the first
or the last time.
Then your time on earth
will be filled with glory

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

How to be serene

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All the world religions and wisdom traditions come to the same conclusion: True contentment comes about through  working out, through the twists and turns of one’s own life, a personal understanding of these deeply different realities.

For whoever has learned to love,

for whoever has learned to suffer,

life is imbued with serene beauty

Br Roger

Giving life’s events some space and time

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More lessons from these three days. There are different ways of saying that at times we need to be patient, to sit in silence and wait for the real meaning of what is happening to become clear. It is put beautifully in this quote: we need to give difficult periods the space their “gentle origins” demand. We do not need to “add on” stories, which only ultimately make things more difficult.

If you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow, and instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge – from which new sorrows will be born for others – then sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply. And if you have given sorrow the space its gentle origins demand, then you may truly say: life is beautiful and so rich.

Etty  Hillesum

Waiting: the patience that is found in Nature

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The Lily is a symbol of Easter, being associated with new life and a pure offering to God. In this poem, Mary Oliver sees the flower silently following night and day, darkness and light, the up’s and down’s of life, trusting, knowing that the dawn will follow the night. It is a thought which suits this Easter Saturday,-  starting , as it has, in more muted colours than the glorious sunshine of yesterday – a day which places the emphasis on waiting. The flower waits for the silver moon and the golden sun, which are often used to refer to the unconscious, unknown part of our lives and the conscious, known parts.  It trusts that what is now unconscious will become conscious in time. This trust is a  quiet, contented attitude – the trust of a child  who knows that ultimately all is good  –  an attitude that we  cultivate when we sit in meditation.

Night after night, darkness enters the face
of the lily which, lightly, closes its five walls around itself,
and its purse of honey, and its fragrance,
and is content to stand there
in the garden, not quite sleeping,
and, maybe, saying in lily language
some small words we can’t hear
even when there is no wind anywhere,
its lips are so secret, its tongue is so hidden –
or, maybe, it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience
of vegetables and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon
becomes the golden sun –
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it, the perfect prayer?

Mary Oliver, The Lily

All directions have a meaning

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No matter what stories our mind may tell us in times of difficulty, all things are ordered and return to their home. We are calm deep down when we realize that our days have meaning in an overall rhythm  and we are not isolated but have a place in the overall “family of things”

The wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
the world offers itself to your imagination, 
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place 
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver