Tag: Nature

How life is full of mysteries

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Went walking this morning early in the forest around the Sources of the Allendon. It was particularly beautiful in the early morning light. The freshness of nature, the trees covered in moss, the noise of the river and the familiarity of the place relaxed and softened my heart. Nature is often like that: It creates those  moments when we connect and feel spacious. It is not so easy in our everyday life with people: we have learnt to contract and pull away. The beauty of the walk brought to mind this poem by Mary Oliver:

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity, while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes

Growth

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There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud

was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anais Nin

The secret is in the seeing

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Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty

never grows old.

Frank Kafka

Natural cycles

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Went walking early yesterday alongside the lake in Divonne. It was completely frozen,  a barren landscape.  The bare trees were stripped down to their essentials, the ground hard. The ducks and swans were walking on the surface of the lake, white in the cold morning air. One wonders what they eat, if they will survive this cold, if the natural cycles are too hard for them. For us too, there are natural cycles, natural learning. Sometimes it may feel like a struggle to just survive. At other times it seems that we are in different phases of growth, such as when we arrive at the end of a year.  One thing we do at this time is look back and see what will grow into next year and what to let go of.

Every year
everything I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation, whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go

Mary Oliver

In our darkest night

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Being Irish,  I always remember Newgrange on this day. It is an enormous burial tomb, built over 5000 years ago,  before Stonehenge and the Pyramids. It has with a small, dark inner chamber where the light penetrates just once a year at the dawn of this day,  to warm those who have died for a few moments.

The Ancient Celts knew intimately the passage of the sun and the sacredness of certain days. Today, the darkest and shortest day of the year, they ensured that the sun still touched where they were buried. For us too, no matter how dark our interior life becomes, or how deeply we feel buried,  light can still enter and illuminate. No matter how frozen we feel or how we shut ourselves off in fear of expoitation by others, we can be warmed and opened.

May hope and light,  in some way,  touch us all today.

Oak trees

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We try to be fully present in everything we do. We focus on just walking when we walk, and when listening to others we try to fully listen, not thinking ahead to the answer.  The vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn writes beautifully on giving whatever we are doing our full attention, taking care of one moment after another. Each event is important even if it is just washing a cup. In that way we are fully open to the happiness that is possible right now,  in each moment, if we just have eyes to see.

We learn this looking at nature around us and seeing how in silence each tree is perfectly complete in this moment. Nothing needs to be added. We are reminded of the old philopsophy maxim – actio sequitur esse- or action is based on being. Everything we do, all our happiness, is rooted in the heart. We touch into the heart every time we remember to be fully in each moment, not leaning onto the next, not always trying to be elsewhere or someone other than ourselves. Sitting practice strengthens this too: we do not try to feel anything particular, we drop all of our planning and additions and being in relationship  to just this moment, to just being.

An oak tree is an oak tree.  That is all it has to do.

If an oak tree is less than an oak tree, then we are all in trouble.

Thich Nhat Hahn