The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that’s happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.
Ram Dass
The ongoing news about the pandemic activates the anxious side of our brain and leaves us feeling shaky, imagining worst-case scenarios for the future. These words from Kabir remind us that much of the time we are not grounded in where we actually are.
Be strong then, and enter into your own body; There you have a solid place for your feet. Think about it carefully! Don’t go off somewhere else!
Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things,
And stand firm in that which you are.
Kabir, 15th-century Indian mystic poet
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
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
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
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
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