Tag: Nature

A time for integration

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As we leave the expansiveness of summer and settle into autumn’s rhythms and routines, we may discover a desire or longing to integrate our fresh insights. … All the spiritual traditions of the world acknowledge that wisdom comes from the accrued learnings of our experiences, and this includes those learnings we reap by following someone else’s inspired path for a time. What is at the center of your life at this time? What is your central motivation now? Whenever we have the experience of being ourselves, or of loving what we are doing, we arrive at the center of what is important for us.

Angeles Arrien

Aligned with nature

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Pass through this brief life in accordance with nature…

Gladly…like an olive that ripens and falls…

grateful to the tree that it grew on.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations 4,48

Autumn Clouds

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This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds,
Watching the birth and death of beings is like looking at movements of a dance,
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.

The Buddha, Lalitavistara Sutra, 13.79

Sunday Quote: Miracle

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To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.

Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

A wise metaphor

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“Seasons” is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think.

It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all — and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.

Parker Palmer, From Language to Life

The circles of the seasons

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

Wendell Berry