Seeing possibilities and not waiting

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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

buds

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

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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

Sunday Quote: what we miss

spring buds

The whole of life lies in the verb “seeing”

Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit theologian and palaeontologist

In the garden

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Everything that slows us down
and forces patience,
everything that sets us back
into the slow circles of nature,
is a help.

Gardening is an instrument of grace.

May Sarton

photo m tullottes

Sunday Quote: Seeing

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It is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain

Mary Oliver, Daisies