Tag: Nature

Learning from nature: the seasons cannot be hurried

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Flickr - don macauley - A lamb in the mists.png

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

Our value does not come from our work

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Camas Lily flower in McGurk MeadowConsider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground bulbs
for flour, how the settler’s hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you — what of your rushed and
useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything,
leaving only a note: “Gone to the fields
to be lovely. Be back when I’m through
with blooming.”
Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake.
Of course, your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

Lynn Ungar, Camas Lilies

Keeping here

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Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today; 

And give us not to think so far away 

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here 

All simply in the springing of the year.

Robert Frost

Walking in the woods this morning

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P1000210Masters of stillness, masters of light,
who, when cut by something
falling, go nowhere and heal,
teach me this nowhere,

who, when falling themselves,
simply wait to root in another direction,
teach me this falling.

Four hundred year old trees,
who draw aliveness from the earth
like smoke from the heart of God,
we come, not knowing you will hush our little want
to be big;

we come, not knowing
that all the work is so much
busyness of mind; all
the worry, so much
busyness of heart.

As the sun warms anything near,
being warms everything still
and the great still things
that outlast us

make us crack like leaves of laurel
releasing a fragrance
that has always been.

Mark Nepo, In Muir Woods

Patient waiting

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The first snow of the winter fell here this morning, covering the garden and making life harder for the birds as they search for feed.  It will accelerate the movement towards Nature’s resting and waiting,  which this year has been postponed due to the mild autumn. We can learn from this cyclical process, which reminds us of necessary elements in our lives also, especially when we pass through moments of difficulty or transition. Sometimes resting and not knowing is natural and waiting is the wisest thing  we can do.

I am a book of snow,
a spacious hand, an open meadow,
a circle that waits,
I belong to the earth and its winter.

Paolo Neruda

Sunday Quote: What is here

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I discovered the secret of the sea
in meditation upon the dew drop.

Kahil Gibran