Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark.
That’s where the most important things come from,
the things that break your sticks and change your life.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The unknown
Tag: unknown
Hidden in the mists
A nice poem for the weather we are having these days on this island on the edge of Europe. Insight deepens when we resist the urge to prematurely close meaning, allowing complexity to speak in its own time.
How would it be to allow for knowing
and not knowing: allowing room
for the mystery of creating
to be able to wonder softly
without needing to understand everything
to trust in the process, to trust in love
to trust in the mystery and wonder
of the universe
that beats softly wildly
true, all round about us,
that is hidden in the mists in the clouds and the rain
in the wind blowing and the rain lashing down on your window,
reminding you poetically, prosaically
that this is where you are,
on the island, at the edge,
in a place of finding and refinding,
and remembering to remember
the feel of the mist, wind and rain.
John O’ Donohue
A new month
Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”
Offer yourself to the world — your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart — with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail.
To grow in love and service, you — I, all of us — must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success… Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn — that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice.
Parker Palmer, The Six Pillars of the Wholehearted Life, Commencement Address, Naropa University
