Inside each of us, there’s continual autumn.
Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water…..
There’s a necessary dying,
and then Jesus is breathing again.
Very little grows on jagged rock.
Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers
will come up where you are.
You’ve been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.
Rumi, A Necessary Autumn inside Each
There are some things that we simply must wait in silence to receive.
We live our questions and wait for the knowing to happen.
Like the tree, we wait for the sap to rise.
Sue Monk Kidd, When The Heart Waits
There are so many things that hold us back from our dreams
Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice.
By freedom I mean freedom from afflictions, from anger, and from despair.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Be Free Where You Are
Continuing with a sequence of Mary Oliver poems for autumn. A lot of wind and rain here yesterday and overnight. Plenty of mud…
Angels are wonderful but they are so, well, aloof.
It’s what I sense in the mud and the roots of the
trees, or the well, or the barn, or the rock with
its citron map of lichen that halts my feet and
makes my eyes flare, feeling the presence of some
spirit, some small god, who abides there.
If I were a perfect person, I would be bowing
continuously.
I’m not, though I pause wherever I feel this
holiness, which is why I’m so often late coming
back from wherever I went.
Forgive me.
Mary Oliver, Forgive me
Someday we’ll live in the sky.
Meanwhile, the house of our lives is the world.
The fields, the ponds, the birds.
The thick black oaks — surely they are the
children of God.
The feistiness among the tiger lilies,
the hedges of runaway honeysuckle, that no one owns.
Where is it? I ask, and then
my feet know it.
One jump, and I’m home.
Mary Oliver, Boundaries (Extract)
Human beings are made of water.
we were not designed
to hold ourselves
together,
rather run freely
like oceans,
like rivers.
Beau Taplin, Run Freely
Mindfulbalance 