Tag: Present moment

The in-between space

Karl Duffy3 Comments

You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out; the way forward is still concealed from you.

“The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.”

You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk, your eyes are blurred; and there is no mirror.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust; You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free from all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here is your mind, and it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become for your arrival in the new dawn.

John O’Donohue, “For the Interim Time” in Benedictus: A Book of Blessings

Love and wholeness

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In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety – in fact, most neuroses and compulsions – are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition.

We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light.

Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.

Marion Woodman, Jungian author and poet, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

Called to let go

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Where is this peace to be found? The answer is clear. In weakness. First of all, in our own weakness, in those places of our hearts where we feel most broken, most insecure, most in agony, most afraid. Why there? Because there, our familiar ways of controlling our world are being stripped away; there we are called to let go from doing much, thinking much, and relying on our self-sufficiency. Right there where we are weakest the peace which is not of this world is hidden.

Henri Nouwen

Where wisdom arises

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When a person remains focused on the inconstancy of everything that comes together,

ignorance is abandoned,

and clear knowing [wisdom] arises.

The Buddha, Itivuttaka: The Group of Threes, Iti 3.36; 

A larger purpose

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March 25th, The Feastday of the Annunciation

In her poem “Annunciation,” Denise Levertov suggests that the message the angel Gabriel brings to Mary is one that comes to each of us. We receive an intimation of some purpose larger and more challenging than anything we have imagined for ourselves, but all too often those strange and risky times….

“More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.“

Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life

Manipulating the world

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Your mind has very little control over this world. It is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It cannot control the weather and other natural forces. Nor can it control all people, places, and things around you. You have given your mind an impossible task by asking it to manipulate the world in order to fix your personal inner problems.

If you want to achieve a healthy state of being, stop asking your mind to do this. Just relieve your mind of the job of making sure that everyone and everything will be the way you need them to be so that you can feel better inside. 

Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul