Let go

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Despite all the recent storms in Ireland, buds are starting to appear on the trees. A lesson in resilience and trust. Most of us are very good at bringing suffering upon ourselves.  We turn small issues into  problems and then fixate on the worries and anxieties and let them fester and take root inside us. We are less good at simply letting go and letting things develop in their own time.

Sitting quietly,

doing nothing,

Spring comes,

and the grass grows,

by itself.

Matsuo Bashō, 1644 – 1694

photo tim horton

Not seeing

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

snowdrop
What in this moment
Is lacking?

Rinzai.

Starting over

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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

The music in our heart

When I am silent,

I fall into that place where everything is music.

Rumi

Persistent practice

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