If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings. Sometimes the great famine of blessings in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love; rather, we are living the life that is expected of us. We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.
John O Donohue
Everything that slows us down
and forces patience,
everything that sets us back
into the slow circles of nature,
is a help.
May Sarton
Fall is when nature plants her seeds. And yet, the seeds of possibility planted with such hopefulness in the fall must eventually endure winter, a season when the potentials planted at our birth appear to be dead and gone. As we look out upon the winter landscape of our lives, it seems clear that whatever was planted is now frozen over, winter-killed, buried deep in the snow. Far too many teachers, physicians, and other professionals find the winter metaphor an all-too-apt description of the inner landscape of their lives.
But as we come to understand winter in the natural world, we learn that what we see out there is not death so much as dormancy. Some things have died, of course, but much that is alive goes underground in winter to await a season of renewal and rebirth. So winter gives us a chance to name, metaphorically, whatever may feel dead in us, to wonder whether it might be not dead but dormant — and to ask what we can do to help it, and ourselves, to “winter through” until spring. As adults, we like to think of ourselves as fulfilled, not partially dormant. When we drop that pretense and acknowledge how much remains unfulfilled in us, good things can happen, and not for us alone.
Spring is the season of surprise. Now we realize that, despite our winter doubts, darkness yields to light, and death makes way for new life. So one metaphor for this season is “the flowering of paradox”. As winter’s darkness and death give rise to their apparent opposites, spring invites us to contemplate the many both-ands we must hold to live life fully and well: the deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more grief we are likely to know. Spring reminds us that, as creatures of the natural world, we know how to embrace paradox as instinctively as we know how to breathe both in and out. Our challenge is to stop using our minds to divide everything into forced choices, into either-ors.
Parker Palmer, Teaching with Heart and Soul
Joy is exactly what’s happening minus our opinion of it.
Charlotte Joko Beck.
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
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, A Prayer in Spring
This morning two birds
fell down the side of the maple tree
like a tuft of fire, a wheel of fire
a love knot out of control as they plunged through the air
pressed against each other
and I thought
how I meant to live a quiet life
how I meant to live a life of mildness and meditation
tapping the careful words against each other
and I thought—
as though I were suddenly spinning, like a bar of silver
as though I had shaken my arms and lo! they were wings—
of the Buddha
when he rose from his green garden
when he rose in his powerful ivory body
when he turned to the long dusty road without end
when he covered his hair with ribbons and the petals of flowers
when he opened his hands to the world.
Mary Oliver, Spring
Because of the Day that is today, two works from different periods in Irish history, a far cry from some of the twee sentimental blessings you will see attributed to Ireland on this day. The first, a simple but beautiful morning prayer for strength and protection, is attributed to Saint Patrick himself. It draws into the person the strength and stability which nature has – the calm depths of the sea, the firm constancy of the mountains. The second, by John O’ Donohue, has a similar theme, praying that the strength seen in nature be “an invisible cloak” in times of difficulty. Both give us an inspiration for a simple practice. While sitting we bring to our minds eye the solidity of a mountain or the calmness of the ocean. We stay with these for the period of our sitting, becoming, in one sense, the mountain of the ocean, seeing their unchanging nature despite changing weather or surface turbulence. Meditating like this works particularly well when we feel pulled in many different directions or momentarily out of control as it allows us to attach our inner sense with the unchanging aspects of the natural world.
We see in both pieces the inspiration which Irish spirituality found in the natural world. In the Celtic mind the space between nature and the other world was always very close, and our inner self could be nourished every day not in church but right there on the land, in every field and on every hilltop. Their sense of self was connected to the landscape, which gave to every person an inner geography. As some writers have said, nature for them was a “thin place”, where the space between the holy and the ordinary is very thin and it is easier to connect with our true self. It helps, in mindfulness terms, to come home to the present, and see that ordinary experience is whole and complete, and that the holy becomes ordinary – this step, this flower, this conversation, this life.
The Breastplate of Saint Patrick
I arise today, through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun
Brilliance of moon
Splendour of fire
Speed of lightning
Swiftness of wind
Depth of sea
Stability of earth
Firmness of rock.
John O Donohue, Beannacht (“Blessing”)
On the day when the weight deadens
on your shoulders and you stumble,
may the clay dance to balance you.
And when your eyes freeze behind
the grey window and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours, indigo, red, green, and azure blue
come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow wind work these words
of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life.
La Fhéile Padraig sona dibh! A Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to you.
Mindfulbalance 