Tag: Nature

Not seeing

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storm tree

As I was driving the other day in Kildare I noticed silhouettes of bare trees on the hill tops and it remanded me of this quote. We do not always see the full story of what is happening in our lives. We have to hold a space for not-knowing, for allowing things to develop at their own pace.

I prefer winter ……when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.

Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.

Andrew Wyatt,  American Painter

Something to practice with today

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snowdrop
What in this moment
Is lacking?

Rinzai.

Starting over

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IMG_1935

In the Christian liturgical tradition today is the last day of the year, with Advent starting this evening,  marking the start of a New Year. It is as good a time as any other to make this change, and certainly less commercial and not as hyped than the 31st of December. One way or the other,  there are themes in nature and in different cultures at this time of the year and as winter approaches – letting go, slowing down, taking stock, welcoming change, seeking more light in the dark corners of our hearts:

For last year’s words
belong to last year’s language
and next year’s words
await another voice.

And to make an end
is to make a beginning.

T.S. Eliot

Sunday Quote: Joy

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The music in our heart

When I am silent,

I fall into that place where everything is music.

Rumi

Persistent practice

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tree blown

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

Sunday quote: the sound of nature

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river allondon

The deepest words of the wise …teach us

the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows

or the sound of the water when it is flowing

Antonio Machado, Spanish poet, 1875 – 1939