The beauty even in the most ordinary.
Wonder even in the most commonplace:
Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it
and whispers, “Grow, grow”.
The Talmud
Tag: Nature
We discover as we go along
Walking on the country roads near my house early yesterday. It is nice walking the same paths each day or each week – we see the changes that the seasons bring, and the colours which follow those changes. The fields demonstrate a constant succession of decay and growth. However, we also see what does not change and how the path stretches out in front of us each day, not matter how many things have moved on.
We don’t receive wisdom;
we must discover it for ourselves after a journey
that no one can take for us, or spare us.
Marcel Proust
Not trying to get anywhere else
They harvested the field of barley beside our house yesterday. Planted last autumn, it has grown strongly even in the present drought. Another cycle of planting, caring and harvesting completed, each in its own rhythm. The energy in the seed comes to fruition in its own time and cannot be rushed.
If you cultivate patience, you almost can’t help cultivating mindfulness, and your meditation practice will become richer and more mature. After all 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 – sometimes in us, sometimes in those who have to be around us. 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.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are
Patience and appreciation
It does not astonish or make us angry that it takes a whole year to bring into the house three great white peonies and two pale blue iris. It seems altogether right and appropriate that these glories are earned with long patience and faith. . . . and also that it is altogether right and appropriate that they cannot last. Yet in our human relations we are outraged when the supreme moments, the moments of flowering, must be waited for. . . . and then cannot last. We reach a summit, and then have to go down again.
May Sarton
The knowledge we get through experience
Only knowledge gained through experience, the fruit of living and suffering, fills the heart with the wisdom of love, instead of crushing it with the disappointment of boredom and final oblivion. It is not the results of our own speculation, but the golden harvest of what we have lived through and suffered through, that has the power to enrich the heart and nourish the spirit. And all the knowledge we have acquired through study can do no more than give us some little help in meeting the problems of life with an alert and ready mind.
Karl Rahner
Sunday Quote: Content with life as it is
If you have a garden and a library,
you have everything you need.
Cicero
Mindfulbalance 