Besieged is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating and even by the creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves, and most especially, a success they have achieved through long years of endeavor.
As creatures we define ourselves through belonging or not belonging, we cannot help but make commitments to people, places and things, which then come looking for us. Conscious or unconscious, we are surrounded not only by the vicissitudes of a difficult world but even more by those of our own making.
If the world will not go away then the great discipline seems to be the ability to make an identity that can live in the midst of everything without feeling beset. Being besieged ask us to begin the day not with a to do list but a not to do list, a moment outside of the time-bound world in which it can be reordered and reprioritized. In this space of undoing and silence we create a foundation from which to re-imagine our day and ourselves. Beginning the daily conversation from a point of view of freedom and being untethered, allows us to re-see ourselves, to reenter the world as if for the first time.
We find that having people knock on our door is as much a privilege as it is a burden; that being seen, being recognized and being wanted by the world and having a place in which to receive everyone and everything, is infinitely preferable to its opposite.
-- from Consolations, by David Whyte p. 27-30
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Courage
'Courage' comes from the Norman French, Coeur, or heart.
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.
To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.
-- from Consolations, by David Whyte p.39-40
Rest by David Whyte
Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.
To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally and figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull's eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.
We are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning. When we give and take in an easy foundational way we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested.
To rest is not self-indulgent, to rest is to prepare to give the best of ourselves, and to perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given.
In the first state of rest is the sense of stopping, of giving up on what we have been doing or how we have been being.
-- from Consolations, by David Whyte p. 181-182
To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally and figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull's eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.
We are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning. When we give and take in an easy foundational way we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested.
To rest is not self-indulgent, to rest is to prepare to give the best of ourselves, and to perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given.
In the first state of rest is the sense of stopping, of giving up on what we have been doing or how we have been being.
-- from Consolations, by David Whyte p. 181-182
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Tao Te Ching #2
When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.
Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
Before and after follow each other.
Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she let's them go.
She has but she doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
Notes:
acts without doing anything: Her actions are appropriate responses. Thus they are effortless. She embodies compassion, yet she doesn't try to be compassionate. She doesn't struggle to make money, yet she enjoys spending it when it comes to her. She goes her own way, yet she accepts help gratefully and has no pride in walking alone. She is not elated by praise, not discouraged by neglect. She doesn't give even a moment's thought to right or wrong. She never has to make a decision; decisions arise by themselves. She is like an actress who loves her role. The Tao is writing the script.
teaches without saying anything: The way she buys oranges or ties her shoelaces is a teaching. Her face is more eloquent than any scripture could be.
-- from Stephen Mitchell's translation. The notes are his.
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.
Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
Before and after follow each other.
Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she let's them go.
She has but she doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
Notes:
acts without doing anything: Her actions are appropriate responses. Thus they are effortless. She embodies compassion, yet she doesn't try to be compassionate. She doesn't struggle to make money, yet she enjoys spending it when it comes to her. She goes her own way, yet she accepts help gratefully and has no pride in walking alone. She is not elated by praise, not discouraged by neglect. She doesn't give even a moment's thought to right or wrong. She never has to make a decision; decisions arise by themselves. She is like an actress who loves her role. The Tao is writing the script.
teaches without saying anything: The way she buys oranges or ties her shoelaces is a teaching. Her face is more eloquent than any scripture could be.
-- from Stephen Mitchell's translation. The notes are his.
Sunday, May 17, 2015
In the Quiet, I Hear Birds Singing
In the Quiet, I Hear the Birds Singing
for Suzuki Roshi
In the quiet, I hear the birds singing,
two together, and one alone.
The wind is silver and spiraling.
The frog sits nobly on mossy stone.
I feel at ease.
Each day, I wake into fragrance,
flower-light and fruit-light, freshening
and flourishing inside me.
In the quiet, I listen with a different kind of mind,
nothing is missing-my life
is generous as it is:
a petal on a wave,
a sky changing color,
my reflection as a tree in clear water.
I feel at ease, here.
Like a child lights up when held in love,
I am buoyant and eternal, unafraid
of time.
Yes, in the quiet, I hear the birds singing,
three together, and not one of us, alone.
By Teresa Williams
II by Wendell Berry
I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends
nothing, but only knows
where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes,
and finds that he is smiling
not by his own will.
-- Wendell Berry, from Given p. 70
who explains nothing and defends
nothing, but only knows
where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes,
and finds that he is smiling
not by his own will.
-- Wendell Berry, from Given p. 70
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Poem of the One World
Poem of the One World
This morning
This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating above the water
and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to
where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else
which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.
-- Mary Oliver, from A Thousand Mornings
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