Tag: Nature

Process and flow

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The first day of Spring in the older Celtic tradition

By gently letting go of everything – not through force, not by slaying it, but simply seeing all the content as a passing show, as process and flow – we become the whole of our experience and open to our natural understanding.

If fear or wanting arises, it is seen within the spaciousness that surrounds it. We don’t get lost by becoming it, but simply see it as just another moment in the mind flow, another something which arose uninvited and will pass away in the same manner.

Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening

The still mind of winter

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Very unlike the mild winter we are having here in Ireland, but a mind that is perfect for meditation

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

A time for slow replenishment

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They adapt. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty…. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it’s essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.

It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.

Katherine May, Wintering: How I Learned to Flourish When Life Became Frozen 

Appreciate

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.

Anton Chekhov

Always in transformation

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Most of us believe that we will spend seventy, eighty, ninety or one hundred years on this planet and then we’ll be gone. But when we look deeply, we see this is a wrong perception.

Your lifespan is not limited to seventy, eighty, ninety or one hundred years and that is good news. Your body is not your self; you are much more than this body. You are life without boundaries.

We are not limited to our physical body, even when we are alive. We inter-are with our ancestors, our descendants, and the whole of the cosmos. We do not have a separate self. We are interconnected with all of life, and we, and everything, are always in transformation

Thich Nhat Hahn, How to live when a Loved One Dies

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