That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning.
“Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings
photo of Bantry bay, philip Halling
Tag: Nature
Sunday Quote: Marvellous
In all things in nature
there is something
of the marvellous
Aristotle
photo wing-chi poon
The full moon
Prompted by seeing a beautiful (almost) full moon in the clear Kildare sky last evening:
At night, deep in the mountains
I sit in meditation
The affairs of men never reach here
Everything is quiet and empty
The incense has been swallowed up
by the endless night;
My robe has become a garment of dew.
Unable to sleep, I walk into the woods;
Suddenly, above the highest peak,
the full moon appears.
Ryokan, Zen Buddhist monk, 1758 – 1831
photo Andrew Choy
Seeing possibilities and not waiting
In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.
Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak
photo fluous
Begin afresh
I was reminded of Larkin’s beautiful poem by the buds opening on the trees in the garden and on the hedgerows around here in County Kildare. This time of year moves him from a reflection on loss and grief, to thoughts on being born again, to finally being convinced to begin over again. The message is like something “almost being said”, so we need to create time to see this: we learn from nature and from this season if we are still enough to listen.
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.Philip Larkin, The Trees
The Cherry blossoms
You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest
and I smile and am silent and even my soul remains quiet;
It lives in the world that no one owns.
Trees blossom.
Water flows.
Li Po, 701 – 762
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