Very wet and windy this morning, the beginning of of a storm. The news today is full of agitation and uncertainty, including Brexit, Ukraine, migration and the lack of vision of our “leaders”. Where can we find a firm ground?
O to be self-balanced for contingencies,
to confront night, storms, hunger,
ridicule, accidents, rebuffs,
as the trees and animals do
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,
One of which was you.
Mary Oliver, So every day
We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows
Jack Gilbert, American Poet, 1925 – 2012
You know that the seed is inside the chestnut tree and inside the seed there are blossoms of the tree and the chestnuts and the shade. So inside the human body there is the seed, and inside the seed there is the human body again
Thinkers, listen…. tell me what you know of that which is not inside the soul: Take a jug of water and set it down on the water – now it has water inside and water outside. We shouldn’t give it a name, in case silly people start talking again about the body and the soul.
If you want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth: Listen to the secret sound, the real sound which is inside you. The One nobody talks of speaks the secret sound to himself, and he is the One who has made it all.
Kabir
Every year we have been witness to it: how the world descends into a rich mash, in order that it may resume. And therefore who would cry out
to the petals on the ground to stay, knowing, as we must, how the vivacity of what was, is married
to the vitality of what will be? I don’t say it’s easy, but what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world be true? So let us go on
though the sun be swinging east, and the ponds be cold and black, and the sweets of the year be doomed.
Mary Oliver, Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness
To regress in a certain way is to return to origins, to step back from the battle line of existence, to remember the gods and spirits and elements of nature, including your own pristine nature, the person you were at the beginning. You return to the womb of imagination so that your pregnancy can recycle. You are always being born, always dying to the day to find the restorative waters of night. Darkness is natural, one of the life processes. There may be some promise, the mere suggestion that life is going forward, even though you have no sense of where you are headed. It’s a time of waiting and trusting. My attitude as a therapist in these situations is not to be anxious for a conclusion or even understanding.
You have to sit with these things and in due time let them be revealed for what they are.
Thomas Moore, The Dark Night of the Soul
Mindfulbalance 