Tag: Nature

Making time for nature

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquility of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. The silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real.

Thomas Merton

A hidden beauty

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…You come, dreaming of ferns and flowers

and new leaves unfolding

upon the brash turnip-hearted skunk cabbage…

…Your kneel beside it. The smell

is lurid and flows in the most

unabashed way…

…but these are the woods you love,

where the secret name

of every death is life again – a miracle…

…What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

Mary Oliver, Skunk Cabbage

This weekends weather

Karl Duffy3 Comments

low cloud Jura april 28

Snow, rain and low clouds on the Jura. The weather moves from Spring to Autumn, confusing the plants and the birds. A useful lesson for us in working with our inner changing moods:

High winds do not last all morning

Heavy rain does not last all day

Why is this? Heaven and Earth!

If heaven and earth cannot make things eternal

Why do we think it happens for us?

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Grateful seeing

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springbuds

Grateful seeing is the ability to look first for what is good and working in our lives without minimizing or denying the hardships or challenges that are also present. Many traditional societies hold the perspective, or world-view, that what has been given to us ultimately ignites growth and strengthens us. Individuals who are viewed as seers are highly respected, honored, and valued for their gifts of insight, vision, and grateful seeing.  We, too, can learn to be seers — seers of the blessings, learnings, mercies, and protections that surround us everyday. In Spring, we open to the bounty and goodness that is present in our lives, any pockets of ingratitude that once seemed large in our imaginations become dwarfed — nearly nonexistent. It is important to remember that whatever we need to rectify in our lives is often small in proportion to all the benefits we have extended toward and received from others. All the good intentions, prayers, good deeds, and kind words we have offered others are still with us: they cannot be taken away, and this is a great source of encouragement.

Angeles Arrien

A prayer to nature

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blossom tree 140413

Earth teach me stillness
    As the grasses are stilled with light.
Earth teach me acceptance and readiness
    As the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me regeneration
    As the seed which rises in the spring.
Earth teach me to forget myself
    As melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me to remember kindness
    As dry fields weep with rain.

Prayer of the Ute people

Learning from nature: the seasons cannot be hurried

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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If you cultivate patience, you almost can’t help cultivating mindfulness, and your meditation practice will gradually become richer and more mature. If you really aren’t trying to get anywhere else in this moment,  patience  takes care of itself. It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself. Being in a hurry usually doesn’t help and it can create a great deal of suffering. Patience is an ever-present alternative to the mind’s endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself)  or something for it. From the perspective of patience, things happen because other things happen. Nothing is separate and isolated

Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are

Photo by Donald Macauley