Continuous practice, day after day, is the most appropriate way of expressing gratitude.
This means that you practice continuously, without wasting a single day of your life, without using it for your own sake.
Why is it so? Your life is a fortunate outcome of the continuous practice of the past. You should express your gratitude immediately.
Dogen quoted in Kazuaki Tanahashi, Enlightenment Unfolds Kazuaki Tanahashi
Past and present join
in the winter solstice.
The days will stretch and we survive.
with losses, yes, and lessons too
to reap the honey of the hive
of history. The yield of what is given
insists a choice – to live; to thrive
Peter Fallon, 1951 – Irish Poet, A Winter Solstice
Waiting, watching, trusting…what people have done at this time of year since the beginning of time. These universal themes, rooted in nature, speak to the heart all through the year
Hope begins in the dark,
the stubborn hope that if you just show up
and try to do the right thing,
the dawn will come.
You wait and watch and work:
you don’t give up.
Anne Lamott
Waiting presents an enormous challenge.
We are impatient, I-can-fix-it kinds of people . . . but not all situations can be fixed. We assume that everything in life can be made better by taking action, but sometimes it just isn’t so. We shrink when we are presented with situations where action does no good at all. We deplore the passivity of waiting. Yet waiting is an enormous opportunity if we regard it as a wise teacher. Waiting offers us a great deal when we choose to learn.
Waiting is an important guest to honor in the guest house of our humanity. If we consciously allow waiting to be our teacher, we can accommodate waiting more peacefully. If we welcome waiting as a spiritual discipline, waiting will present its spiritual gifts. Waiting contains some of our richest spiritual opportunities if we are conscious enough and courageous enough to name them and live into them.
Holly Whitcomb, The Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting
Very cold weather here this past week.
This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
John O’Donohue, from Beannacht, Book of Blessings
We must also remember that it is not our responsibility to fix all the brokenness of the world — only to fix what we can. Otherwise we become grandiose, as if we were put here to be the savior of the humanity around us.
Mindfulness and compassion are genuinely undertaken one step at a time, one person, one moment.
Jack Kornfield
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