Another short piece from poet Seamus Heaney, whose funeral is taking place around this time in Dublin.
Getting started, keeping going, getting started again –
in art and in life,
it seems to me this is the essential rhythm .
Seamus Heaney
Tag: Meditation
The Best moment
If someone were to ask us, “Has the best moment of your life arrived yet?” we may say that it will come very soon. But if we continue to live in the same way, it may never arrive. We have to transform this moment into the best moment, and we can do that by stopping – stopping running into the future, stopping worrying about the past, stopping accumulating so much…… Breathing in and out consciously helps you to become your best – calm, fresh, solid, clear and free, able to enjoy the present moment as the best moment of your life.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Your True Home
….whatever you do
Big sporting day in Dublin for the local team….
Leisure and sleep, moments of inactivity and relaxation, can all restore balance within ourselves and allow us touch into our deeper nature. Even a few moments of conscious slowing down, finding some space from our tendency to rush, has a beneficial effect on our overall system. Taking time each day to develop an ongoing practice of mindfulness soothes the nervous system and encourages calm:
Sunday Quote: Wherever you are….
God is a circle whose center is everywhere
and circumference nowhere.
Voltaire
photo: carved spiral design on passage tomb entrance at Newgrange, Co Meath, Ireland
Close to the music
Two short pieces from Seamus Heaney, probably the greatest writer of modern Poetry in Ireland or indeed anywhere in the English language, who died yesterday. Ar dheis De go raibh a anam. Both are about space.
Because there is “constant movement” in our lives, as Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck once said, “with lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place“, we need meditation which in its essence is “simplifying space“, One way of doing that is to simplify the chatter in our minds, creating the space to simply be with each moment, without always running a commentary. We practice to get closer to pure awareness and less caught up in our judgment, criticisms and interpretations. We too try to stay very close to the music:
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
The second is just one of my favourite poems, written after the death of his mother. Her passing leaves a gap in his life, reminding him of the space in the front hedge when they chopped down a tree. When we simplify the situation through meditation, we create an inner space for ourselves, removing ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the constant running. As the poem suggests, this inner space is not completely empty, but is also a source – a “bright nowhere” –
I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard the hatchet’s differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And collapse of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.
The Haw Lantern
photo noel feans
Always looking elsewhere
There is no greater mystery than this,
that we keep seeking reality
though in fact we are reality
Ramana Maharsi
photo epsos.de
