Tag: Nature

Cycles

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Anytime we forget to let go, life will jog us back into remembering. There is nothing that we can cling to in this world. Ultimately, all that we hold dear will require us to let go, in some shape or form. That child will grow up and leave home. That love relationship that’s going so wonderfully? A new cycle will come, in its time. That friendship will change. That job you thought you’d always have? Oops, the company merged. Your position is changed.

Although long-term relationships and secure employment and living in that house feels good, remember, that’s not where your security lies.

Let yourself bond. Let yourself enjoy being friends with the best friend you’ve ever had. Be a loving parent, 100 percent. Throw yourself into that job with all your heart and soul. But your security and joy are not in that other person or job. [It}.. is in you.

Melody Beattie

Try to remember

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This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

Mary Oliver, Fall Song

Ripening

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If as you age you become more still, you will discover that stillness can be a great companion. The fragments of your life will have time to unify, and the places where your soul-shelter is wounded or broken will have time to knit and heal. You will be able to return to yourself. In this stillness, you will engage your soul. Many people miss out on themselves completely as they journey through life. They know others, they know places, they know skills, they know their work, but tragically, they do not know themselves at all. Aging can be a lovely time of ripening when you actually meet yourself, indeed maybe for the first time. 

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

The nature of things

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The nature of experience itself is change and movement, and this is why so many of us find that we’re to one degree or another being knocked off balance and losing our sense of equanimity. The entire world seems to be shifting, and it seems to be happening very, very quickly. So if we’re looking for a relative stillness, if we’re looking for all of this change and movement to stop, we’re always going to be frustrated, because this kind of stillness is elusive, very hard to maintain, and it can slip away in any given moment. Instead of trying to control our minds or environments by contracting or hiding in order to find this inner stillness, we must throw our senses wide open – listening, feeling, seeing – and become very wide and vast.

When you welcome all of experience into your awareness, a certain type of stillness starts to emerge organically. 

Adyashanti

Sunday Quote: Complete

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There is not a fragment in all nature,

for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself

John Muir

A time for integration

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As we leave the expansiveness of summer and settle into autumn’s rhythms and routines, we may discover a desire or longing to integrate our fresh insights. … All the spiritual traditions of the world acknowledge that wisdom comes from the accrued learnings of our experiences, and this includes those learnings we reap by following someone else’s inspired path for a time. What is at the center of your life at this time? What is your central motivation now? Whenever we have the experience of being ourselves, or of loving what we are doing, we arrive at the center of what is important for us.

Angeles Arrien