Everyone alive has suffered. It is the wisdom gained from our wounds and from our own experiences of suffering that makes us able to heal. Becoming expert has turned out to be less important than remembering and trusting the wholeness in myself and everyone else. Expertise cures, but wounded people can best be healed by other wounded people. Only other wounded people can understand what is needed, for the healing of suffering is compassion, not expertise.
Rachel Naomi Remen
Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.
Vaclav Havel
Went walking early yesterday alongside the lake in Divonne. It was completely frozen, a barren landscape. The bare trees were stripped down to their essentials, the ground hard. The ducks and swans were walking on the surface of the lake, white in the cold morning air. One wonders what they eat, if they will survive this cold, if the natural cycles are too hard for them. For us too, there are natural cycles, natural learning. Sometimes it may feel like a struggle to just survive. At other times it seems that we are in different phases of growth, such as when we arrive at the end of a year. One thing we do at this time is look back and see what will grow into next year and what to let go of.
Every year
everything I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation, whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go
Mary Oliver
There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.
Hafiz
A similar theme to the Mary Oliver poem posted this week. Sometimes we feel lost and do not know where we are going. We feel powerless, having nothing to offer, with empty hands. We have to leave behind all we have relied on up to now. We utter a heartfelt wish that things could become clearer. It is in the stillness that wisdom speaks to the heart and reveals what we have been looking for.
In this high place
it is as simple as this:
leave everything you know behind.
Step toward the cold surface,
say the old prayer of rough love
and open both arms.
Those who come with empty hands
will stare into the lake astonished.
There, in the cold light
reflecting pure snow,
is the true shape of your own face.
David Whyte
Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.
A white flower grows in quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower
Rumi
Mindfulbalance 