Tag: Meditation

Halloween bonfires

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This evening marks the important Celtic feast of Samhain which starts winter and we enter the “darker half” of the year, a theme which is somewhat reflected in the celebration of Halloween. However, the ancient idea was far deeper, as we are invited to go inside and imitate the landscape in slowing down. Some element of darkness is present in all our lives. Modern society has enough elements to keep up distracted, but inevitably, from time to time, we are confronted with life’s fragility and we are invited to welcome its lessons. Moments such as these help burn away what is not essential and bring us back to our foundations. We see what really matters  and realize that searching outside of ourselves is not the way:

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,  
that for us  
as we go up in flames,

our one work is
to open ourselves, to be  
the flames?

Galway Kinnell

The vulnerability of life

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Things are changing all the time. This makes us seek who and what will anchor us in all of this change:
Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable, like a little bird.
To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, and support.
Life and death are connected by vulnerability.
The newborn child and the dying elder both remind us of the preciousness of our lives.
Let’s not forget the preciousness and vulnerability of life during the times we are successful and popular.
Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey

The kingdom of the eternal

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When we love and allow ourselves to be loved,

we begin more and more to inhabit the kingdom of the eternal.  

Fear changes into courage, emptiness becomes plenitude, and distance becomes intimacy.

John O’Donohue, AnamCara

Every simple act

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We must remind ourselves that, though our lives are small and our acts seem insignificant. we are generative elements of this universe, and we create meaning with every act that we perform or fail to perform.

It is here, on this earth, in the day-to-day, on our street corners, at our evening table, in the homes of our friends, at the bedside of the sick, in the warmth or sadness of our child’s days, that the universe is being formed. 

Kent Nerburn, Make me a channel of your peace

Hidden

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We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments.

But great moments often catch us unaware –

beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.

Kent Nerburn, Make me an Instrument of your Peace: Living the Prayer of Saint Francis

Doing the ordinary things right

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We like to think –  going into work this day – that we might get the opportunity to do something profound and meaningful that will change lives and impact upon policy. Or that we will change people in ways that will bring them closer to our point of view and values. And maybe we will. However, in the meanwhile, we will get lots of ordinary opportunities – to be kind or to listen –  small things which we can overlook, but if we do with love, can have a real impact upon persons.

 [Thomas Merton]  once met a Zen novice who had just finished his first year in the monastery. Merton asked the novice what he had learned during the course of the novitiate, half expecting to hear about encounters with enlightenment, discoveries of the spirit, perhaps even altered states of consciousness.  But the novice replied that during his first year in the contemplative life he had simply learned to open and close doors.

“Learned to open and close doors” Merton loved the answer and often retold the story, for it exemplified for him “play” at its very best – doing the ordinary while being absorbed in it  intensely and utterly.

Haase, A., Living the Lord’s Prayer: The Way of the Disciple

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