Humility - Brian Doyle

 

You cannot control anything.
You cannot order or command everything.
You cannot fix and repair everything.
You cannot protect [people] from pain
and loss and tragedy and illness.
You cannot be sure you will always be
employed, or healthy, or relatively sane.

All you can do is face the world with quiet grace.

When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story
in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or
several at once, sometimes;  when we are older we take on
other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you
and I both know men and women who become trapped in
the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately
imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives simply to
escape who they no longer wish to be;  but finally, I think, if
we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with
humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief....
and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and
true about humility.

Humility does not mean self abnegation, lassitude, detachment;
it's more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which
does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly
ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture.  You
must trust that you being you matters somehow...

[and that]

.....pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy...

[and]
You do your best to reach out tenderly and touch and elevate as
many people as you can reach...

You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath
you draw.  Humility is the road to love.  Humility, maybe, is
love.  That could be.  I wouldn't know; I'm a muddle and a 
conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder,
trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards
of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.

Brian Doyle

Excerpts from the chapter - "The Final Frontier"
From: One Long River Song

~

Photo from the Internet

The Greater Need - D. H. Lawrence

The rhythm of the cosmos is something we cannot get
away from without impoverishing our lives.  We must get
back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos
and universe.
For the truth is, we perish for lack of fulfillment of our greater
needs, we are cut off from the great source of our inward
nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally
in the universe...

D. H. Lawrence

~

Life involves both chaos and order and we sometimes
want desperately to control things, and we become
vulnerable to simplistic answers.

What is needed is courage to live in the midst of the
ambiguities of this moment...

Swimme and Tucker

~

Photo taken by my husband

 

Attune to The Rhythm - Henry Miller

When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist.  Try to solve
it, and you only set up more resistance.  I am very certain now
that...if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall
away.  The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with
one's whole being, is that you alone control nothing.

To be able to put yourself in tune or rhythm with the forces
beyond, which are truly operative ones, that is the task...

Henry Miller

~

Photo - The October 2024 Aurora Borealis
taken by my brother in Mass.

~

"Touch Eternity/a deeper Reality on a daily basis"

MM

 

It Floats Us - Ivan Granger

The vast flood
Rolls onward
But yield yourself,
And it floats you upon it.

Ikkyu

Day after day, experience after experience, terrors and tragedies,
joys and victories, everything  - life.  It can feel like an onslaught.

Most of us learn to dampen down the awareness in order to cope
and mimic those around us.

Yet even with dimmed senses we feel overwhelmed.

But yield yourself,
And it floats you upon it.

This is the liberating wisdom of surrender.

Most of our intense efforts in life, whether directed toward work,
family, even spirituality, are about trying to control the flow
of life.  We want to master the flood, bring it under our will.
We want to tame it so we can be safe.

But it never really works.

The lifelong effort is like a duck on a great river who imagines
he controls the current by the action of his paddling feet.

When he happens to face downstream - Amazing!  The river goes
just where he commanded!  When he turns left or right, he imagines
that he needs to increase his effort and improve his technique to get
the river flowing where he wants.  And when he turns downstream -
Calamity!  He has lost control of the river.

Or...  he can just sit on top of the river and let its current carry him.

Yielding ourselves to this great river, no longer imagining that we
can control it, we can finally begin to discover its true nature and
direction - and beauty.  We come to see its flow as a unifying harmony
and not a threat. Importantly, we notice our natural buoyancy.  
We are built to float upon it.

Commentary by Ivan Granger
at Poetry Chaikhana

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
(didn't have a picture of a duck :)

 

Change - Frank Ostaseski

We don't grow and transform in our comfort zones.  We grow
when we realize we are no longer able to control all the
conditions of our lives, and are therefore challenged to
change...  When we release our clinging to what used to be
and our craving for what we think should be, we are free to
embrace the truth of what is in this moment.

No matter what we do or don't do, things will always change.
Change is constant and inevitable.  We need to trust ourselves
and persevere without despair...

Frank Ostaseski

The Five Invitations

 

"it happens" - Kathleen Knipp

.....in our "practice" of life, we can just rest back and experience
how it's being done.  We don't have to do life, life happens in
whatever way it happens.  [But] we claim the activity that
happens as something volitional.

Observe the belief, explore the belief that I am in control, that
 I am the "doer" [of what happens].  Question the belief.
Life is happening, just as breathing is happening or thinking is
happening.

What would it feel like to slide out of the picture into an
observer position, being aware of thoughts that are generated
by the mind and emotional states that arise and pass - watching
it all happen.  It plays out like an old show on a big screen.
Step back and watch with a sense of curiosity.  See yourself as a
"character" that you observe - watching, observing, noticing all
the different sensations of the body - the different experiences.
Have compassion for your "character."  Life is changing out of
our control, our expectations, our wants.

Surrender to the Great Mystery, beyond comprehension, before
time, before conceptualization; inexplicable but palpable.
Source reveals itself in all of its different manifestations - as
profound tranquility and turbulence, as mind stuff, as breath
and body: the totality of all of its expressions.
Rest deeply in this knowing.

Kathleen Knipp

Excerpts from a Yoga Nidra Meditation
"it happens"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Nature's Way - Fred LaMotte

The stillness
of the English primrose
in Winter,
furiously blooming
all by itself.
No gardener.
The rain turns to snow,
then back to rain,
without your decision,

or indecision.
No creator.
Morning does this.
Evening does that.
Yet somehow the moon
commingles with the sun
in a kind of diffuse
blue whiteness.
No painter.
And without your
assistance,
countless sentient beings
become themselves.
They choose, they act,
suffer consequences
and rewards,
and they are deeply grateful
to you
for this breath,
for this silence,
for not interfering.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering