A Monday meander: Comfort zones

One foggy morning. (Looking out at the neighbor’s new dock.)

When we pause, allow a gap, and breath deeply, we can experience instant refreshment. Suddenly we slow down, look out, and there’s the world. It can feel like briefly standing in the eye of the tornado or the still point of a turning wheel. Our mood may be agitated or cheerful. What we see and hear may be chaos or it may be the ocean, the mountains, or birds flying across a clear blue sky. Either way, momentarily our mind is still and we are not pulled in or pushed away by what we are experiencing.

~ Pema Chodron

The accountability factor

Early morning walk.

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be… This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide… Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don’t ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.

~ Madeleine L’Engle

10. A sunrise walk in the woods

Morning on the dock.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

~ Wendell Berry, Excerpted from his poem “Given” 

9. Inhale, exhale

Maria’s clouds moved out near sunset yesterday and took some of the sunset colors with her.

Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

Forty Early Mornings

Glory of morning.

Forty Early Mornings Alone

A new moon teaches gradualness

and deliberation, and how one gives birth

to oneself slowly. Patience with small details

makes perfect a large work, like the universe.

What nine months of attention does for an embryo

forty early mornings alone will do

for your gradually growing wholeness.

-Rumi, The Illuminated Rumi

Outer bands

The backyard view on Saturday.

In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.

~ Criss Jami, Venus in Arms