An eye is meant to see things.
The soul is here for its own joy.
A head has one use: To love a genuine love.
The feet: To chase after it.
Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,
for learning what men have done and tried to do.
Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind
when it only wants to see why.
A lover is always accused of something.
But when he finds his love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back completely changed.
Rumi, Night and Sleep
I had a conversation the other morning with a friend on the need to have a certain lightness in the way we hold life each day, a kind of simplicity. Getting the balance between the demands of love and the pull it places on the heart on one hand and detachment on the other is not easy. However, modern society stimulates attachment, so the letting-go perspective of all the wisdom and religious traditions is a useful reminder. The fact that it is a consistent presence in all cultures would suggest that it is a truth closely related to our deepest happiness:
So you should view this fleeting world
As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
Diamond Sutra
In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission.
When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition.
It will always mean leaving something behind,…
The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain.
David Richo, How to be an Adult
And consider, always, every day,
the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.
Mary Oliver
photo Takashi Hososhima
Philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time. So that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven’t had a true moment for yourself. And you know, to relax in and to just be.
Because, you know, the way in this country — there’s all the different zones. I think there are these zones within us as well. There’s surface time, which is really a rapid-fire Ferrari time… over-structured, like, and stolen from you, thieved all the time.
And what I love in this regard is my old friend Meister Eckhart…..he said, “There is a place in the soul — there is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch.” And I really thought that was amazing, and if you cash it out, what it means is, that in — that your identity is not equivalent to your biography. And that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.
John O Donohue, Interview with Krista Tippett, On Being
photo AgCam
When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude. For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor and author, died July 2nd 2016
Simple flowers from the Mad Hatter Cafe, Castledermot
