Have the best year of your life

Honouring Mary Oliver. Whose poetry has brought so much richness to how I live and how I look at this beautiful world. Rest in the peace you brought to so many.

One of my old, old patterns is trying to work things out in my head. The old script runs something like ‘If only I just think a bit harder or a bit longer I’ll know what to do/say/what’s going on.’

When the truth is that the best decisions of my life have just ‘arrived’; only when my brain has been still have I been able to hear what I know speaking softly to me.

This wonderful poem by Irish poet Rachel Holstead expresses this far better than I’ve just done.( And I’m able to share it with you because Rachel generously publishes her poems under a creative commons licence: see http://www.rachelholstead.net/these-are-not-my-words)

FRONTIERS

On those difficult days, when a frontier looms,
decisions seem called for
and the armies of your mind muster
and set off on a headlong gallop
towards the horizon,

they make so much noise
that the heart’s soft voice
is drowned out,
and kick up so much dust
that compassion’s anchor loses purchase.

The faster the armies gallop
the farther away the horizon seems,
the bumpier the path
and the cloudier the dusty air

and we trip over innocent rocks
and trample innocent plants
and startle quietly grazing flocks,
causing them to scatter
and become embroiled in our turmoil.

But if we can persuade the horde
to slow a little
– that stopping a while will help
rather than hinder –
perhaps we can sit by the side of the track
and let the dust settle
and the noise die away.

And somehow we find ourselves
where we need to be
– which is here –
and we can set anchor again.

And when out of the silence,
the soft voice of our heart speaks,
it has all the answers we need.

From mythology we learned that labyrinths were mazes, comprising confusing paths and passageways. But in recent times they’ve come to be created and used by those who want to make a journey to the centre of themselves, passing through confusion and the traps our minds lay for us to the truth at our hearts. 
This beautiful poem and film really captures the peace of a mind that quietens within the labyrinth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNM93EEs7WI

Make yourself a cuppa and enjoy Robert Holden’s meditation on tea for the next 20 minutes. Funny and thought provoking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDpoyA1XTys

I read this today, from my friend Sunil Bali: “Get outside and get lost in nature because this is our true nature. In evolutionary terms, it wasn’t that long ago that we lived in caves. Humans have become too domesticated and were born to be wild. There maybe no wifi in the forest, but you will find a better connection.”

I was stunned by the beauty of this picture from my friend Debbie. She spotted an Allium that had finished flowering and has it in a vase on her windowsill. A lovely reminder to those of us no longer in the flush of youth that beauty is ageless.

For the last two months, since mum had another stroke, the image in front of my eyes has been of ageing as a process of small daily losses and depletion. In the care home where she is staying are other elders who need everything doing for them: who have lost their physicality or their grasp on the present – or both.

How good this morning to read this blogpost and be reminded that ageing does not HAVE to look this way. There are millions more out there using their learning, experience, commitment and passion to continue contributing.
http://www.sunilbali.com/2017/03/running-on-plenty/

Back to Mary Oliver for my thought for today. I love this poem for staring life and death so squarely in the face and finding in both an intention for how to live and die…..

WHEN DEATH COMES

When death comes 
like the hungry bear in autumn; 
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; 
when death comes 
like the measle-pox

when death comes 
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: 
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything 
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, 
and I look upon time as no more than an idea, 
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common 
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, 
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something 
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life 
I was a bride married to amazement. 
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder 
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, 
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

–Mary Oliver

Wanting to fix things, believing we ought to be able to work everything out, are pretty familiar to most of us. But what if all of this really is OK? I love this post from my friend, and Serenity Retreat supremo Kim Bennett, on just allowing….

“About feeling dreadful. Sometimes we feel really really awful. Life feels tormented, difficult, unassailable, pointless and impossible. I remember speaking to a non duality teacher, Mandi Solk, on skype and telling her that I was having a bad day. She quickly picked me up for that – ‘no you’re not’ she said. Well I was pretty sure that I was and felt quite indignant about it. But then she went on: ‘you’re having a horrible moment, and then a dreadful moment, and then an average moment, and then a horrible moment, and then a moment of laughter, and then a miserable moment and then a satisfying moment’ and so on and so forth.

“She was absolutely right. I wasn’t in a ‘bad’ state all of the time. No state continues in exactly the same fashion. Every ‘state’ has its own landscape, entirely different, moment by moment. Doesn’t mean that it’s easy or that there are answers (not having answers is very difficult for the thinking mind which feels unemployed in moments like this and can sound louder than normal). But you’ll see that there is aliveness and life energy. Creativity can arise when we accept the shitness of how we’re feeling, stop looking for answers and relax into feeling tormented/dreadful etc without wanting to change it. That’s incredibly counter-intuitive in our culture of fixing things. And certainly not what most of us would want for ourselves. It seems to me, though, that that’s how it is. The only way is through and there can be some quite beautiful gold to be found. It won’t look like any sort of gold you’ve seen before though :)”

Just come across a great idea for this month – a reverse advent calendar to be donated later to a local food bank.

Put a cardboard box in the corner and every day from now until 24th December add a small item. After Xmas, when money is tight all around, take the box to the nearest foodbank.