Waiting, watching, trusting…what people have done at this time of year since the beginning of time. These universal themes, rooted in nature, speak to the heart all through the year
Hope begins in the dark,
the stubborn hope that if you just show up
and try to do the right thing,
the dawn will come.
You wait and watch and work:
you don’t give up.
Anne Lamott
Waiting presents an enormous challenge.
We are impatient, I-can-fix-it kinds of people . . . but not all situations can be fixed. We assume that everything in life can be made better by taking action, but sometimes it just isn’t so. We shrink when we are presented with situations where action does no good at all. We deplore the passivity of waiting. Yet waiting is an enormous opportunity if we regard it as a wise teacher. Waiting offers us a great deal when we choose to learn.
Waiting is an important guest to honor in the guest house of our humanity. If we consciously allow waiting to be our teacher, we can accommodate waiting more peacefully. If we welcome waiting as a spiritual discipline, waiting will present its spiritual gifts. Waiting contains some of our richest spiritual opportunities if we are conscious enough and courageous enough to name them and live into them.
Holly Whitcomb, The Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting
Very cold weather here this past week.
This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
John O’Donohue, from Beannacht, Book of Blessings
We must also remember that it is not our responsibility to fix all the brokenness of the world — only to fix what we can. Otherwise we become grandiose, as if we were put here to be the savior of the humanity around us.
Mindfulness and compassion are genuinely undertaken one step at a time, one person, one moment.
Jack Kornfield
If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth.
This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily we dedicate ourselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities – “selves”, that is to say, regarded as objects. Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them they are real).
Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
There is only one thing that all twelve stages [of the Four Noble Truths] have in common — they all present a highly subjective experience without mention of self. They are all expressed as: “There is; it is to be; it has been.”
The unenlightened perspective surely is: “I am; I should; I have…” If I was a mathematician, I could probably draw up an equation based upon these data which concludes: “I am” = “unenlightenment.”
The description of the practice of the Four Noble Truths does not suggest a process of becoming enlightened. It seems that a particular viewpoint is sustained, and understanding arises through it. The viewpoint is a focus upon dukkha [suffering/ stress] in an objective, dispassionate way. …This leads to a most powerful insight because it reveals that dukkha is structured, created and not absolute, and therefore possible to be dismantled or not created.
Ajahn Sucitto, The Dawn of the Dhamma
Mindfulbalance 