A Monday meander: Small stones

On the shore, looking through the clear water.

Be positive and enjoy more, laugh more, dance more, sing more.  Become more and more cheerful, enthusiastic about small things, even very small things.  Life consists of small things, but if you can bring the quality of cheerfulness to small things, the total will be tremendous.

So don’t wait for anything great to happen.  Great things do happen — it is not that they don’t — but don’t wait for the something great to happen.  It happens only when you start living small, ordinary, day-to-day things with a new mind, with new freshness, with new vitality, with new enthusiasm.  Then by and by you accumulate, and that accumulation one day explodes into sheer joy.

But one never knows when it will happen.  One has to just go on collecting pebbles on the shore.  The totality becomes the great happening.  When you collect one pebble, it is a pebble.  When all the pebbles are together, suddenly they are diamonds.  That’s the miracle of life.

There are many people in the world who miss because they are always waiting for something great.  It can’t happen.  It happens only through small things:  eating your breakfast, walking, taking a bath, talking to a friend, just sitting alone looking at the sky or lying on your bed doing nothing.  These small things are what life is made of.  They are the very stuff of life.

~ Osho, Day 120, Everyday Osho

In the woods

Phantasm.

It is eerily dark and silent in the woods today.  A crow broadcasts an insistent warning from high atop a loblolly pine, a rough caw-caw-caaawwww.  Animal tracks crisscross the trails.  A dead field mouse lies curled up on the main path, an offering to whatever else might be stalking through the woods on this strangely quiet and shadowy day.

The North Wind

Boreas arrived.

A vigorous, energetic north wind blew in this morning  (or maybe it was sometime overnight) pushing out into the Atlantic Ocean four days of heavy cloud cover and a variety of rains, from the misty to the drippy to the deluge that heralded the approach of the cold front last night.  The weather system might be in England by now for all I know.  Except for a few wisps of clouds here and there, the sky has an after-the-storm clarity to it, and the sun has once more returned.  It is colder now, but the big ball of light up in the sky has brought warmth for the soul.  Even the dandelions in the lawn are smiling today.

You can almost see its smile.

Now (and then)

At any moment the fully present mind can shatter time and burst into Now.

~ David Steindl-Rast

If you follow my other blog (Bountiful Healing), where posts are rare these days, you have already seen this image.  It’s a collage I created to go with the small stone (poem) that I wrote recently.  I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing small stones again.  It will be good practice for the Mindful Writing Challenge in January 2014.

Today’s joys:  The gifts of the early morning.  Frost sparkling in the sunlight.   Picking out new frames for my glasses.  The clear, crisp light of the stars on a cold night.  Healing.