Tag: Nature

Seasons

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Today is the first day of Spring. The weather is beautiful here at the moment and it is easy to feel the “joys of spring”. The cherry blossom and magnolia trees are in bloom. Time passes quickly. I can remember taking photographs of the same magnolia tree last year.  Short  term joys come easily; Long term happiness develops when we see into their true nature:

In Spring, hundreds of flowers.
In Summer, refreshing breeze.
In Autumn, a harvest moon.
In Winter, snowflakes accompany you.

If you do not have
the upside-down views
every season is
a good season for you.

Buddhist classic texts (translated by Eido Shimano Roshi)

Be struck by life today

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Another lovely poem by Mary Oliver on how we can look at the world – and everything we see today – as a doorway to deeper mysteries and as a place where our heart can grow. Her words reconnect us with all that is around us and with a deep sense of acceptance of our journey here.

As for life, I’m humbled,
I’m without words sufficient to say

how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these and over and over,

and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries, beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched

though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen—
a tree angel, perhaps, or a ghost of holiness.

Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort—
along with human love,

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about

stopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,

and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.

Mary Oliver, Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond

(Photograph courtesy of Jasmine Trotter  http://killdollphotographies.tumblr.com/)

Cultivating appreciation

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Today was another beautiful day here, with early Spring sunshine. And in the afternoon I was fortunate to walk the lanes near my house and look over the fields at the Jura mountains nearby. It was another day where I was struck by the ordinary, simple, kindness of people and their support, as well as moved by the struggles and pains of others who are simply trying to make the best of life with the gifts and talents at their disposal. On days like this  it is easy to find space in one’s mind for kindness and spaciousness and practice appreciation for all the good things, big and small,  that come our way. This  wakens us up to all the gifts which are given to us.  When we do this we strengthen our capacity to be calm and relax with life as it is, not as how we want it to be. We are looking at the abundance that it already present in our heart and in our life, not  complaining about what we do not have.

Appreciation is a relaxing and peaceful state of mind. It creates a space in which we can accommodate the vicissitudes of life and even think of the welfare of others. Complaint, on the other hand, is frustrating and painful. There’s an element of anger and fixation involved. We are believing our thoughts, taking them to be real. Our attachment to the concept of how we want things to be is stressful, because that concept is always disintegrating. What we wanted to happen is not happening. We think complaining is going to get the world back on our track, but really it results in our being deaf, dumb and blind to the present moment. Narrowing our mind with complaint is unpleasant and claustrophobic, the opposite of contentment.

When we complain, we’re saying that the world needs to change in order for us to be okay. If only our parent or partner would behave differently, if only the food were better, if only there were less traffic, if only the service were quicker—then we’d be happy.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche.

Reducing stress: Just be aimless for a while

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This is good advice when the weather is as beautiful as it is today. Sometimes stress comes at us in the form of busyness or deadlines at work, which do not give up. Therefore it is good for us to take time out from them – even ten minutes – and to simply have time for ourselves without the pressure  to respond to others or to timetables. All the better if this can be done outdoors, in a park or by the Lake:

Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.  We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.

Maya Angelou

We grow our own future

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The heart is like a garden.

It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love.

What seeds will you plant there?

Buddha

When things feel heavy

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When we feel heavy, or are weary, and we want to rise from all that saddens our souls, we can turn to nature these days as it stirs from its winter slumber, and let it nourish and give wings to our imagination:

In spring the blue azures bow down
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the fields.

Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows–
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking–

don’t seem enough to carry me through this
world, and I think: how I would like

to have wings–
blue ones–
ribbons of flame.

How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.

And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London–a boy staring through the window, when God came fluttering up.

Of course, he screamed, seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body
leaning on the sill, and the thousand-faceted eyes.

Well, who knows. Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.

Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up, and turned away from the sooty sill and the
dark city– turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings,

to a life of the imagination.

Mary Oliver, Blue Azures