Tag: Nature

Transitions

Karl Duffy2 Comments

It has been a very slow transition this year….

One of the beautiful transitions in nature is the transition from winter to springtime. An old Zen mystic said, when one flower blooms it is spring everywhere. When the first innocent, infant-like flower appears on the earth, one senses nature stirring beneath the frozen surface. There is a lovely phrase in Gaelic, ‘ag borradh’, meaning that there is a quivering life about to break forth. The wonderful colours and the new life the earth receives makes spring a time of great exuberance and hope. In a certain sense, spring is the youngest season. Winter is the oldest season. Winter was there form the very beginning. It reigned amidst the silence and bleakness of nature for hundreds of millions of years before vegetation. Spring is a youthful season; it comes forth in a rush of life and promise, hope and possibility. At the heart of the spring there is a great inner longing. It is the time when desire and memory stir towards each other. Consequently, springtime in your soul is a wonderful time to undertake some new adventure, some new project, or to make some important changes in your life. If you undertake this, when it is springtime in your soul, then the rhythm, the energy and the hidden light of your own clay works with you. You are in the flow of your own growth and potential. Springtime in the soul can be beautiful, hopeful and strenghtening. You can make difficult transitions very naturally in an unforced and spontaneous way.

John O’Donohue,  Anam Cara

Sunday Quote: Roots

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A reflective life means hitting the pause button from time to time. Today marks the start of Holy Week in the Western tradition, the most important week in terms of giving meaning to life.

Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

By three methods we may learn wisdom:

First, by reflection, which is noblest;

Second, by imitation, which is easiest;

and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Confucius, born 551 B.C.

Fresh

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Today is the Spring Equinox – from the Latin “equal night”, when there is equal light and dark in our day –   marking the beginning of Spring for countries in the Northern Hemisphere.

We, the older ones,
Call it Spring,
And we have been through it
Many times.

But there is still nothing
Like the children bringing home
Such happiness
In their small hands.

Mary Oliver, Children, It’s Spring

A Celtic blessing

Karl Duffy2 Comments

This old Celtic prayer from Scotland is appropriate for two reasons today –  the feast of Saint Patrick, the patron of Ireland and because of the weather we have had this week: 

May the blessing of the rain be on you, 
may it beat upon your Spirit and wash it fair and clean,
and leave there a shining pool where the blue of Heaven shines, 
and sometimes a star. 

And may the blessing of the earth be on you, 
soft under your feet as you pass along the roads, 
soft under you as you lie out on it, tired at the end of day; 
and may it rest easy over you when, at last, you lie out under it. 

May it rest so lightly over you that your soul may be out from under it quickly;up and off and on its way to God. 

And now may the Lord bless you, and bless you kindly.

Amen.

Sunday Quote: Even in times of difficulty, keep planting

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Faith is hope in the unseen. Often we cannot see the results of the efforts we are putting in …

Even if the Hour of Resurrection comes up,

and one of you is holding a sapling in your hand….

 finish planting it.

The Prophet Mohammed

Quietly, quietly

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly.
leaving nothing out.

Wendell Berry,  Leavings.