The first day of Spring in the Celtic Calendar, the important feast of Imbolc, halfway between solstices, with themes of light and fertility, hidden seeds and new life.
Lord, the air smells good today, straight from the mysteries
within the inner courts of God.
A grace like new clothes thrown across the garden,
free medicine for everybody.
The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise.
Rumi
Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.
Pema Chodron
Whenever we step away from emotional reactivity, a confining narrative or our filtering concepts, and relate directly to what is present in the here and now, we are taking the backward step.
Give up a practice based on intellectual understanding – searching for phrases and chasing after words.
Take the backward step and turn the light inward.
Your body-mind of itself will drop away, and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.
Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Fukanzazengi
After the cold and the storms, bright Spring-like days in Ireland for the weekend.
And if you missed a day, there was always the next,
and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit.
Louise Gluck, Sunrise [extract]
Five hundred of Rumi’s odes conclude with khamush, silence.
Rumi is less interested in language, more attuned to the sources of it.….Rumi has a whole theory of language based on the reed flute (ney). Beneath everything we say, and within each note of the reed flute, lies a nostalgia for the reed bed. Language and music are possible only because we’re empty, hollow, and separated from the source. All language is a longing for home.
Colman Barks, On Silence
It is hard to believe that the practice can be reduced to something so simple, paying direct attention to the present moment – to this breath, this person, this walk, to this washing of the dishes. We imagine it should be something grander. It may be simple; however, it is not easy
One day a man asked Zen master Ikkyu, “Master, will you please write for me some pointers to the highest wisdom?”
Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word: “Attention.”
“Is that all?” asked the man. “Will you not add something more ?”
Ikkyu then wrote : “Attention. Attention. Attention.”
Mindfulbalance 