When Beauty brightens

A poem I have posted before, remembering those who have gone before us.

Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,
Where no storm or might or pain can reach you.

We look towards each other no longer
From the old distance of our names;
Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,
As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,
We know our soul’s gaze is upon your face,
Smiling back at us from within everything
To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,
Darkest winter has turned to spring;
May this dark grief flower with hope
In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:

To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again.

John O’Donohue

Remembering on All Souls Day

Today is All Souls Day, the traditional day for remembering those dear to us who have died. It is still celebrated as an important day in the Latin countries, such as Italy, where cemeteries are covered in flowers as families take time to visit and remember. Sadness on occasions such as this is related to love, when we cannot be with someone who is dear to us. This day reminds us that taking a moment  for consciously remembering loved ones who have passed is an important inner practice in our lives.

All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I’m sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is.

Frank O’Connor

On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.

Walter Savage Landor

We are asked to love

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business.

What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.

Thomas Merton

Things to do this weekend

Modern culture keeps sending all these messages that the people who know how to live properly are always doing something.

The great question “What are you doing this weekend?” keeps coming up, as if that defines us. We hear talk about lives where everything is “so busy that I do not have time to think”, or “I am so busy I never have time for myself”, or “I am so busy I am exhausted”, and this word, busy, busy, busy comes up time and again, and it starts to sound like an epidemic –  an epidemic of busyness.

Abbot Christopher Jameson, The Big Silence, BBC2

Balancing interior and exterior

We are all looking to balance our lives. The key dimension is not really the work-life balance but more balancing our inner and our outer lives. Mindfulness practice focuses on developing our inner life – our  clear seeing of who we are and what is going on in our lives each moment. Balancing these worlds – our being with our doing,  our need for solitude and our need for connection, our energies that lead us outside ourselves and those which touch into our self-awareness and purpose – is what leads to real peace.

It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world.

If we become addicted to the externals our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of your inner world. This wholesomeness  is natural; to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Getting to know you

Meditation, whatever method you are using, is simply getting to know your mind. It is not about meditating ‘on’ something or getting into a zone where you are blissfully removed from your mind’s contents.

Instead, the actual meaning of meditation is more like getting used to being with your own mind.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche