The nature of reality

The waters before, and the waters after,

Now and forever flowing,

follow each other.

Alan Watts, The Flow of Zen

Sunday Quote: On seeing the first bales of hay

This is the art of the soul:

to harvest your deeper life

from all the seasons of your experience.

John O’Donohue

Living life to the full

I will be like
someone who cannot
hide their love
but my joy will become 
ordinary 
and everyday
and like a lover
I will find out
exactly what it is like
to be the happiest,
 
the only one in creation
to really 
understand 
how much,
I’m just a hair’s breadth
from dying.

David Whyte, Mortality My Mistress [extract]

Impermanence

Somewhat easy to learn impermanence in Ireland this Summer… one day sun, the next grey, then rain…. Do not need the great Ryoken to remind me.

See and realize
that this world
is not permanent.

Neither late nor early flowers
will remain.

Ryokan, Zen Monk and Poet, 1758 – 1831

In stillness

I studied the bird, deeply impressed that she seemed to know instinctively that in stillness is healing.  I had been learning that too, learning that stillness can be a prayer that transforms us.

Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits

The year goes round

If I could gear my mind to the year’s round,

take season into season without a break,

instead of feeling my heart bound and rebound

because of the full moon or the first snowflake,

I should have gained something.

John Hewitt, 1907 – 1967 Northern Irish Poet, O Country People