Tag: Life

A Balanced way

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The modern commercial celebration of Christmas carries within it the danger of over-anticipation, where we could fall into a projection as to how everything is going to go perfectly, or is going to be suddenly different in the future. We tie our happiness to a certain form of a future moment, which only leads us to feel more discontent when we see that nothing really has changed

A different perspective is found in the Western Liturgy, which begins to sing from December 17th the beautiful “O” Antiphons, dating from the 4th Century, putting into words hopes based on a deeper perspective. The one for today asks for Wisdom, to teach us a balanced way of living. . 

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out

Vaclav Havel

Sunday Quote: Wonder

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A great person is one who has not lost the heart of a child.

Mencius, 372 – 289 BC, Chinese Philosopher

Natural change

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Moving towards the shortest day of the year this week, dark mornings and evenings. Very wild and wet again overnight. Easy to see that life is constantly changing, going up and down, with both darkness and life as just natural parts of the overall whole.

Everything — every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate — is always changing, moment to moment. We don’t have to be mystics or physicists to know this. Yet at the level of personal experience, we resist this basic fact. It means that life isn’t always going to go our way. It means there’s loss as well as gain. And we don’t like that.

Pema Chödrön, The Places that Scare you

Being led

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I think of Gloucester, blind, led through the world
To the world’s edge by the hand of a stranger
Who is his faithful son. At the cliff’s verge
He flings away his life, as of no worth,
The true way is lost, his eyes two bleeding wounds–
And finds his life again, and is led on
By the forsaken son who has become
His father, that the good may recognize
Each other, and at last go ripe to death.
We live the given life, and not the planned.

Wendell Barry,A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 

Instructions

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Show up – Choose to be present; Follow what has heart and meaning

Tell the truth without blame or judgment; Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome

Angeles Arrien, The Four Fold Way

Sunday Quote: Life

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Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

Anais Nin