Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.
The least we can do is try to be there
Annie Diliard
Tag: Nature
The hidden work that is essential for growth
The ladder whose ascent implies spiritual progress has a long pedigree. Hebrews, Greeks and Christians all gave special value to the heights, and Western morality tends to put all better things up high and worse things down low. By the last century growth became inexorably caught in this ascensionist fantasy. Darwin’s thesis The Descent of Man became, in our minds, the ascent of man. Each immigrant moved upward in social class as buildings moved upwards with their elevators to more expensive levels. By now the upward idea of growth has become a biographical cliché. To be an adult is to be a grown-up. Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and an heroic one at that. For even tomato plants and the tallest trees send down roots as they rise toward the light. Yet the metaphors for our lives see mainly the upward part of the organic motion.
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code
A mind that looks and does not think
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man
All seasons are needed for growth
Our inner life is complex and multifaceted, like a vast and varied landscape requiring diverse experiences to cultivate it. At times we are challenged to walk and run, at other times to stay and sit. Disappointment is as crucial to our inner life as reliability, the same way that cold is as necessary to the life of a lilac bush as is the sun….Beings like us could never stay in bloom in a tropical world of uninterrupted satisfactions. We need all seasons for a fully realized human experience. Only in a world with shadows can our inner life flourish. The challenge is a ruthless fealty to the seasons of life and change. This includes losses, abandonments and endings chosen or imposed…Disappointment may also be a grace, “the fastest chariot to enlightenment” as the Tibetan saying goes.
David Richo, How to be an Adult in Relationships.
Letting the day pass through the mind
We can …. look upon life as something that flows through the mind. Rather than thinking of oneself as a person who is going places, consider these as images going through the mind. Right now we have the image of the meditation hall; this is what we can perceive. The sound of this voice; the feeling of sitting on a cushion; the sense of sight; see that all these things flow through the mind like a current. When Ajahn Sumedho went traveling recently he said he made the determination before he left that he wasn’t going to go around the world, he was just going to let the world go through his mind. Afterwards he said the result was very peaceful: he went everywhere, saw everyone, did everything, but the sense of movement, of a person heading towards somewhere, was absent; there was stillness in its place.
Ajahn Amaro
Lessons in every season
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter
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