Tag: Meditation

They never stay

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The bad weather this past week has meant that the blossoms on the cherry tree in the garden have all been blown away. Cherry blossoms have long been a symbol for transience and the the ephemeral nature of life, so I suppose they are even more so this year:

Nothing in the world
is usual today.
This is the first morning.

Come quickly –  as soon as
these blossoms open, they fall.
This world exists as a sheen of dew on flowers.

Izumi Shikibu,  10th Century Japanese poetess.

We usually take ourselves to be the sum of these thoughts, ideas, emotions and body sensations, but there is nothing solid to them. How can we claim to be our thoughts or opinions or emotions or body when they never stay the same?

Jack Kornfield

When we are unhappy

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As I have written before, Jacques Lusseyran was a French writer who took part in the Resistance against the German Occupation, and he continued to organize groups against the Nazis even after he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. His work was all the more striking because he was totally blind from the age of 8, following an accident at school. His experiences give him a certain authority when it comes to reflections on what makes for contentment or unhappiness:

Unhappiness, I saw then, comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the center of the world, because we have the miserable conviction that we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity. Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one’s own skin, in one’s own brain.

Jacques Lusseyran.

Why difficulties are necessary

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Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile.

Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.

David Whyte

Human beings, not human doings

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I have merged, like the bird, with the bright air,

And my thought flies to the place by the bo-tree.

Being, not doing, is my first joy.

Theodore Roethke.  American poet

Where joy comes from

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Joy seems to be part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences or expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole  and to show up and meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. This willingness to win or lose moves us out of an adversarial relationship to life and into a powerful kind of openness. From such a position we can make a greater commitment to life. Not only pleasant life or comfortable life, or our idea of life, but all life. Joy seems more closely related to aliveness than to happiness.

Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom

Learning from nature in time of stress

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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry, The Peace Of Wild Things