Tag: Life

Decluttering

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In the Christian tradition the season of Lent begins today, a period of simplification and an opportunity to make space for the deeper realities in our lives, creating room to see what is happening, to go deeper and see where we are being called to invest our energy.

Most people today seems to think that sacrifice means giving something up. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.

Robert Johnson, Jungian Analyst, Balancing Heaven and Earth

A natural rhythm

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Allow your life to unfold naturally.

Just as you breathe in and breathe out,

there is a time for being ahead and a time for being behind;

a time for being in motion and a time for being at rest;

a time for being vigorous and a time for being exhausted;

a time for being safe and a time for being in danger

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 29

One day more

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Cold here this week and snow falls. Some beautiful words to help us in challenging conditions

Windowsills evenly welcome both heat and cold.

Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.

Doors are not equivocal,  floorboards do not hesitate or startle.

Impatience does not stir the curtains,

a bed is neither irritable nor rapacious.

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room

we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,

pointing to hinge and plaster and wood —

          You are matter, as they are.

          See how perfectly it can be done.

          Hold, one day more, what is asked.   

Jane Hirshfield,  A Room

The mid winter spirit

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Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the mid winter spirit of our days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of ongoing surprise and with some wonder and appreciation, flawed and far from perfection, but inhabiting the still center of a beautiful, peripheral giftedness.

David Whyte, Finding the Holy in the Holidays

Settle

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When the uncertainty of the current situation leads us to feel uprooted and we find our minds pulled in all directions by the latest news:

Settle the self on the self

and let your life force blossom

Blanche Hartman, Seeds for a Boundless Life: Zen Teachings from the Heart

Waves and water

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Most people view themselves as waves and forget that they are also water. They are used to living in the realm of birth and death, and they forget about the realm of no birth and no death. Just as a wave lives the life of water, so, too, do we live the life of no birth and no death

Thich Nhat Hanh