Resilience

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.
Jane Hirshfield, Optimism

Familiar moments

Beautiful summer mornings here these last few days…

But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere,

and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds
with the wooden spoon, I remembered,

this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture
after gesture, what else can we know of safety

or of fruitfulness? 

Marie Howe, From Nowhere

Natural goodness

We have a thrifty God,

who lets nothing that is good within us

ever go to waste

Sr Wendy Beckett

 

Sunday Quote: How to measure success in life

If the day and the night are such,  that you greet them with joy,

and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs,

is more elastic, more starry, more immortal…

that is your success.

Henry David  Thoreau

Free medicine

Finally Spring has arrived after the warm sunshine of last weekend. Fresh growth everywhere.

Lord, the air smells good today, 

straight from the mysteries  within the inner courts of God. 

A grace like new clothes thrown  across the garden,

free medicine for everybody.

 The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise,  the first blue violets kneeling.

Whatever came from Being is caught up in being, drunkenly forgetting the way back.

Rumi, Lord, the Air Smells Good Today

The calm underneath

Universal Mind is like a great ocean,

its surface ruffled by waves and surges

but its depths remaining forever unmoved.

The Lankavatara Scripture, c.350 AD