Tag: Nature

There are no wrong seasons.

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It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard…

 I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that…

 But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms.

For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

Mary Oliver, Hurricane (excerpts)

Applying the lessons of autumn

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We all carry these interior lists and shoulds…

Dropping all we carry – all our preconceptions, our interior lists of the ways we’ve failed and the ways we’ve been wronged, all the secret burdens we work at maintaining – dropping all regret and expectations lets our mentality die. Dropping all we have constructed as imperative allows us to be born again into the simplicity of spirit that arises from unencumbered being

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

 

Sunday Quote: Being comfortable with change

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Apprentice yourself to the curve of your own disappearance

David Whyte

Everything moves on

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The autumn equinox arrives at 9:54 PM on Saturday, September 22, officially marking the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere…..

Another year gone, leaving everywhere its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

– the uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing to stay — how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever in these momentary pastures

Mary Oliver, Fall Song

Like a leaf

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When I rise up

Let me rise up joyful

like a bird.

When I fall

Let me fall without

regret

like a leaf

Wendell Berry, Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer

Nature

Karl Duffy4 Comments

 

The first of three poems by Mary Oliver as the seasons change…

Well, there is time left —
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

Mary Oliver, Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches? (extract)