….Go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before….
A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.
Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
Live with the beetle, and the wind.
Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud: A Poem
Look at everything
as though you were seeing it
either for the first
or the last time.
Then your time on earth
will be filled with glory
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
No matter what stories our mind may tell us in times of difficulty, all things are ordered and return to their home. We are calm deep down when we realize that our days have meaning in an overall rhythm and we are not isolated but have a place in the overall “family of things”
The wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that Love is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, Love is under the porch as well as on the top of the mountain, and JOY is both in the front row and in the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Still prompted by the beauty of the hawk I saw hovering in the sky just one week ago, on a beautiful evening similar to this one, and as we start tomorrow the celebration of the Easter festival, I am reminded of this poem by Jesuit poet Gerald Manley Hopkins. He stands in awe of the mastery of the bird in the sky. Again, what looking at Nature shows us is an ability to abide in the moment – to sweep on the air – without resisting it or over-analysing it to see how we are doing. In this creatures such as the hawk are masters of their own nature and possess it in a way that we can only dream of:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Walking in the hills this morning and saw a neglected meadow full of buttercups. It is lovely to see some fields just left “idle”, for wild flowers to then bloom, open for the bees and the butterflies. We do not need to add much to nature, just to let it be and it provides. If left to itself it grows and is fruitful. A bit like our lives. Even when times are tough and seem barren, they grow back and produce fruit even more abundantly than before – we just have to trust in a cycle which often we cannot see but which is not made up by any one event. It unfolds at its own pace, with its own wisdom. If we have the courage to allow it do so, it will lead us to what really matters.
Mindfulbalance 