Tag: Life

mundane miracles

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Today is Candlemas, another ancient feast, this one dating from the 4th Century in the Christian tradition, reflecting a need to mark this moment – halfway between the winter and the spring solstices – by bringing light into the darkness. 

Spirit, use me today, not in some miracle that

would make others marvel, and would make me proud.

Not in the word of wisdom, that would stay in the mind

and make me remembered.

Not in the heroic act, that would change the world for the better

and me for the worse.

But in the mundane miracles, of honesty and truth,

that keep the sky from falling.

In the unremembered quiet words, that keep a soul on the path.

And in the unnoticed acts, that keep the world moving

slowly closer to the light.

Grahame Davis, Prayer

Free medicine

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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

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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

Step back

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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

Returning

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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]

Our true home

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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