You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between us
Normally we do not so much look at things
as overlook them
Alan Watts
photo remi carreiro
The days are getting much shorter here in Ireland, and the colder weather and darker afternoons begin to be felt. This is no surprise as we have passed the old date for the start of winter – the feast of Saint Martin – last Monday. Traditionally, a period of forty days preparation for Christmas began then, a custom dating from the 5th Century. These days coincided with a sense of the natural beginning of winter, with a winding down of work outdoors and the body’s response to that in letting things go and taking recovery time for itself. It was a time of reflection and a simplification of intake, of taking stock and winding down. In today’s world, technology allows us to promote the opposite – longer shopping hours and a speeding up in preparation for the holidays, as Thanksgiving and Christmas advertisements begin to dominate. An ancient way of doing things – probably more in tune with nature’s rhythms – and a modern one. Thus we have a choice.
The first step in any letting go is ‘stepping back’– non-involvement. This initiates letting go by unhooking the mind from the topic that is stirring it up. It’s not a matter of avoiding or suppressing the topic, but of seeing it in a clear and spacious way. Non-involvement is about settling back into the present moment, relaxing into the way things are right now; it’s about letting go of the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts,’ the past, the future and the imaginary, and meeting things as they arise in the present…. Letting go is also about giving things time to shift and settle, and being patient with oneself. It’s about not comparing yourself with others, and letting go of self-images. Letting go makes us more flexible and broad-minded. It’s grounded in the understanding that things change; and that they can change for the better if we’re attentive, mindful, and put aside distractions and negativity.
AjahnSucitto, Meditation, A Way to Awakening
photo kevin law
We have to cultivate contentment with what we have. We really don’t need much. When you know this, the mind settles down. Cultivate generosity. Delight in giving. Learn to live lightly. In this way, we can begin to transform what is negative into what is positive. This is how we start to grow up.
Ani Tenzin Palmo
Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.
Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
artwork: yuma
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.
