Do not ask
for flowery perfume
when I can give you
fruits of autumn
Do not reject nourishment
because winter is at the door
and already the old saints
have raised their brows
to contemplate eternity
We children of the moment
drink up the last of the wine.
Lalla Romana, 1906 – 2001 Italian poet
This holy life is lived for the abandonment of becoming.
The Buddha, Loka Sutta
The abandonment of becoming is often called “the lion’s roar,” the expression of utter freedom and utter majesty. It is so, as mystic poet David Whyte observes that “inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.”
May we recognize the condition of becoming every time it arises – noticing its need to be “the one who,” its need for the nametag, recognizing it as merely egoic hope for future contentment. Having seen where the nametag leads us – to a new “self,” a new birth, new suffering- surrender becomes a joy.
Simply being – with no need for becoming – becomes an ease and a refuge.
Kathleen Dowling Singh, Unbinding: The Grace beyond Self
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We must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before.
It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life.
It doesn’t necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of high-level magic that the new age hopes to press on us. It’s more a sensitivity…. the concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential way of living.
James Hillman
You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, but you mustn’t wish for another life.
The chance you have is the life you’ve got.
You mustn’t want to be somebody else.
What you must do is this: Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
Wendell Berry
Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no,
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.
Rumi
As I walk through the woods along the lake, I’m quickened by nature’s palette of subtle and vivid colors. At the same time — as the leaves drop and the dark skeletons of the trees begin to emerge — I’m sobered by the fact that all green, growing, and glorious things must pass away.
And yet, as the years go by, the more I find that these two feelings dance with each other. The fact that all things must die makes me ever more grateful for the beauties of nature and human nature.
If we let that gratitude animate us to care for the natural and human communities, then what falls to the ground around us and among us will seed the flowering of new life.
As Rilke says in this lovely and well-known poem, “…there is Someone, whose hands, infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.”
We are that Someone’s hands. Let’s hold all this falling in ways that will help the earth and its creatures rise…
Parker J. Palmer
