Mindfulbalance

The Spring Equinox: transformation is often quiet, patient, and without spectacle

Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them.

But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.

Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Hermann Hesse, Trees, Reflections and Poems

The irony is that we attempt to disown our difficult stories to appear more whole or more acceptable, but our wholeness actually depends on the integration of all our experiences, including the falls.

The self is not really a thing, but a process – one that is always changing, always falling apart, and always being reassembled in new ways.

We think that if we can hold ourselves together, we will be safe. But the truth is that the only way we can be truly safe is to acknowledge how fragile we are.

It is only when we stop pretending that we can hold it all together that we discover the indestructibility of our true nature.

Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart

From innumerable and mysterious causes and conditions, benevolent influences have come into my life just as they have guided the lives of others;

So awareness must be extended beyond me and time and incident into the domain of love and integrity and self-surrender that is the source of our lived-in truth.

We are fragile, we are resilient; we are separated, we’re connected. In the language of the heart these are not contradictions. The sense is of embracing the entirety of our humanity.

Ajahn Sucitto