Month: October 2018

Everything is waiting for you

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte

The Stockdale Paradox

Maintain a clear sense of long-term objectives but acknowledge the limits on your day-to-day actions. The gravest errors in the financial and business world are made, not by those who control or know too little, but by those who control or know less than they think.

John Kay

Make the ordinary come alive

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.

William Martin

We’ve had it

If we keep going the way were going, we’ve had it. And even if we follow the Paris agreement and try to reduce emissions, we’ve still had it, because we wouldn’t be reducing carbon dioxide fast enough. The only way we can save ourselves is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere… that would be a very expensive business… the greatest the human race has ever undertaken, but we need to do it to save ourselves. If an asteroid was headed for the earth, people would deploy ever ypossible thing despite the massive costs being incurred. We have to wake up to the fact that that is what the human race has got to do.

Peter Wadhams ScD, professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge.

 

Selective self-delusion

For the sake of our children, our jobs and even our sanity. I like to think of it as, selective self-delusion. It’s natural, it’s necessary and it can be lifesaving. Even as the Mongol hoards sweep in from the north, the Black Plague invades from the south, music must be played and poems need to be written, children and dogs need to be loved the sunrise is still beautiful. AND. We have each other.

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I’m doing the most important thing I could be doing

I wish that I could guarantee you that we’re all going to win in the end, the whole thing. And I can’t, because we don’t know. The physics of climate change is pretty daunting at this point. The momentum of it is pretty big. We’re not going to win everything. We’re not going to stop global climate change. It’s too late for that. But the work you’re doing literally couldn’t be more important. There’s not many people who get to say in their lives, ‘I’m doing the most important thing I could be doing.’ But that’s what you guys are doing today. I can’t guarantee you’re going to win. But I can guarantee you in every corner of the world that we’re going to fight. And that’s going to be enough for now, just knowing that we are taking it on.

Bill McKibben

When despair for the world grows in me

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Healing is a long journey

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime. If only we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become sacred wounds rather than scars to deny, disguise, or project onto others. I am sorry to admit that I first see my wounds as an obstacle more than a gift. Healing is a long journey.

If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, and stories of every culture. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.

Healers who have fully faced their wounds are the only ones who heal anyone else.

Unfortunately, our natural instinct is to try to fix pain, to control it, or even, foolishly, to try to understand it. The ego insists on understanding. That’s why Jesus praises a certain quality even more than love, and he calls it faith. It is the ability to stand in liminal space, to stand on the threshold, to hold the contraries, until we are moved by grace to a much deeper level and a much larger frame, where our private pain is not center stage but a mystery shared with every act of bloodshed and every tear wept since the beginning of time. Our pain is not just our own.

Richard Rohr

Bhí subh mhilis

Ar bhaschrann an dorais
Ach mhuch mé an corraí
Ionam a d’éirigh,
Mar smaoinigh mé ar an lá
Nuair a bheas an bhaschrann glan,
Agus an lámh bheag
Ar iarraidh.

There was jam
On the doorhandle
But I suppressed the anger
That arose in me,
Because I thought of the day
when the doorhandle would be clean
And the little hand
Gone.

Séamus Ó Néill

Vocation

The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.

Wendell Berry

But that was the pearl

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

The Bright Field, RS Thomas 

All is not lost

…all is not lost. As the earth responds and shows us daily the folly of our ways, there is a growing movement of people who recognize that we have gone very far off course. Increasingly people are realizing that another way is not only possible but necessary for our very survival.

Jacqueline Patterson – Director, NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program

Deepening our own self-understanding

Those of us who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. We will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressivity, our ego-centered ambitions, our delusions about ends and means.

Thomas Merton