The first drops of rain

The first drops of rain always bring a smile on our faces.  The smell of wet soil, the damp grass, and the slosh of puddles under our feet makes us want to dance with wanton joy.  Rains make a heart go romantic.  Ever danced in the rain?  The feeling is inexplicably beautiful.  Hold your sweetheart’s hand and walk in the rain while the clouds play cupid.

~ G. K. Chesterton

Walking into the here and now

Life is available only in the present.  That is why we should walk in such a way that every step can bring us to the here and now.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

The sublime seas

Be not the slave of your own past —
plunge into the sublime seas,
dive deep, and swim far,
so you shall come back
with self-respect,
with new power,
with an advanced experience,
that shall explain
and overlook
the old.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Listen…

 

The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
Of an endless past.
Listen: you’ve heard everything.

~ Shinkichi Takahashi, Zen Poems of China and Japan, Lucien Stryk, p. 125

Noticing

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.  And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

~ Daniel Goleman

Winter has been teaching me about itself this year, putting on all kinds of displays that I might never have noticed without this commitment to go outside every day.  I am grateful to finally be noticing, and for the lessons and the gifts I’ve received as a result of noticing.

The middle way

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution.  However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution.  We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

~ Pema Chödrön

From the distance

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers.  Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life.  Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent.  Now your life is unimaginable without them.  Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you.  To lose them now would be to lose yourself.

~ John O’Donohue

This everything dance

I like to live in the sound of water, in the feel of the mountain air.  A sharp reminder hits me:  this world still is alive; it stretches out there shivering toward its own creation, and I’m part of it.  Even my breathing enters into this elaborate give-and-take, this bowing to sun and moon, day and night, winter, summer, storm, still — this tranquil chaos that seems to be going somewhere.  This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.  This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

~ William Stafford

The answer is never the answer

(At the bridge.)

The answer is never the answer.  What’s really interesting is the mystery.  If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking.  I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer — they think they have, so they stop thinking.  But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.  The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

~ Ken Kesy

Going to the next level

(Approaching the abyss)

We have no where to go (really) but down — eventually we must all let go and jump — it is supposedly that act which propels us to the next level — to enlightenment.  What would bring us to this point — where are we willing to give up the self?  Does the fall into the abyss always result in enlightenment?  How would we know?  What do we have to give up to make such a leap?

~ Hakuin Ekaku

I don’t know how we know.  I do know one of the things we have to give up to make a leap, any leap, is fear.  I’ve had to give it up a few times, to carry on with the commitment I made to get outside every day.  I think it was the commitment that gave me the courage to give up the fear so I could make those leaps.

Or maybe I’m just plain crazy, like The Fool in the Tarot, a card I have long identified with.  Sometimes it takes a little crazy to move on or move up, or even just to carry on.