Why worry about tomorrow

People were always getting ready for tomorrow.

I didn’t believe in that.

 Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.

Cormac McCarthy,  The Road

A place to rest

Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself

… and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.

Donald Winnicott, English paediatrician and psychoanalyst 

What is happiness?

I have come to see that our problem is that we don’t know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It’s the ability to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.

Mark Epstein, Opening Up to Happiness

Sunday Quote: ….and the wind

In the East the moon is a symbol of Enlightenment, in the West of the Unconscious. Times of difficulty can be times of growth

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu, Japanese poet, 974-1034, one of the thirty-six female immortals of poetry.

After the rain….

A nice poem for a rainy Saturday.

Her capacity to see wonder in nature, and in life, no matter what the weather,  was extraordinary

Last night
the rain spoke to me
slowly, saying,

what joy
to come falling out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again

in a new way on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,

smelling of iron,
and vanished like a dream of the ocean
into the branches

and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing

under a tree.
The tree was a tree with happy leaves,
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves at the moment,
at which moment

my right hand was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars

and the soft rain—
imagine! imagine!
the wild and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

Mary Oliver, Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

Support

A stormy morning here with high winds predicted for the day. Turbulent news reports also these days, full of dire predictions and evidence that we live in an age of division and suspicion.

Out

Of a great need

We are all holding hands and climbing.

Not loving is a letting go.

Listen, the terrain around here

Is

Far too

Dangerous

For

That.

Hafiz, from The Gift: Poems by Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky.