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
Tag: Nature
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
Transitions
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
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
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
Mindfulbalance 