Occasionally, weep deeply over the life you hoped would be. Grieve the losses.
Then wash your face. Trust God.
And embrace the life you have.
John Piper, Theologian and Pastor
The Life you have
Tag: Present moment
Beauty Changes
Today is Candlemas in the Christian tradition, the lighting of candles to look towards the end of winter, layered on the earlier Celtic feast of Imbolc.
Beauty changes; it’s not static. The seasons change. All the leaves fall off the trees, all the flowers disappear. Everything becomes bleak in winter when there is hardly any noticeable contrast, except in shades of dark and light. Now we might say that spring is more beautiful than winter, if we prefer vibrant colors, beautiful flowers, an the kind of energy that spring brings. But if we open our minds, we also begin to recognize the subtle beauty of winter. We can appreciate the lack of color and silence of winter as much as the energy of spring.
This appreciation comes from not having opinions about things being perfect in a static way. It comes from seeing that the rose is a perfect rose in spring, summer, autumn and winter. For static perfection, you need a plastic rose, but that’s never as satisfying.
Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way
Fear of being frightened
My favourite poem from David Wagoner is ‘Lost’:
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.
The truth of the poem is an old truth. There are places you wish to go, there are places you desperately wish you never left. there are places you imagine you should be, and there is the place called here. In the…poem, it is the rooted things – trees and bushes – that tell the truth to the person who is lost, the person with legs and fear who wishes to be elsewhere. The person must stand still, feel their body still on the ground where they are, in order to learn the wisdom….It is true there are some things that we fear, but there is, even deeper, a fear of fear. So we are prevented from being here not only by being frightened of certain places, but by the fear of being frightened of certain places.
from Padraig O’Tuama’s lovely book, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World
A soft gaze
Most of our suffering comes from having a fixed view of how life, or this day, should go…
For things to reveal themselves to us
we need to be ready to abandon our views about them
Thich Nhat Hahn
Earth stuff and star stuff
The practice of cultivating a loving and kind attitude towards ourselves and others, is not a self-improvement technique but an act of quiet daring. As we let down our habitual guard, as we soften and relax, allowing ourselves to loosen the grip of the thoughts and fears that haunt us, we remember the life is here, quietly offering itself to us in this very moment. We remember that we inhabit bodies that come to us from ancestors who endured and overcame much. We remember our deep connection to the earth and also to the stars. We are made of earth stuff and star stuff.
Tracy Cochran
Sent out
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear: “You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing“….
Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 59
