Best season of your life

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

Wu-Men
13th c Buddhist

Rilke- Questions

…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Clearing

Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose,
Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life.
And wait there patiently, until the song that is your life
Falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize it and greet it.
Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world, so worthy of rescue.

- Martha Postlewaite

Tao Te Ching 48

In pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.

True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way.
It can't be gained by interfering.

- Stephen Mitchell translation

When I Am Among the Trees

When I Am Among the Trees

 

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

 

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

 

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

 

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(Thirst)

 

John O'Donahue

We need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. It is our minds that make our lives so homeless. John O'Donahue


May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

A Standing Ground

A Standing Ground by Wendell Berry

However just and anxious I have been
I will stop and step back
from the crowd of those who may agree
with what I say, and be apart.
There is no earthly promise of life or peace
but where the roots branch and weave 
their patient silent passages in the dark;
uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.
I am not bound for any public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up 
into the healing shadow of the woods.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet berries in a cup.

poem brought to my attention by Patty Schucart