or·di·nar·y

The Catholic liturgical tradition has long divided time in two:  There are two kinds of days in life and two periods of the year. The days were either feast days or ferial days. The year was divided into “ordinary” time and …well, “extra-ordinary” time, I guess. This second segment of the year, come to think about it, I never heard anyone name at all. It was a number of times: Advent, Lent,  the Christmas, Easter and Pentecost seasons. This kind of information may be boring stuff but it’s important stuff, too. Ordinary time, you see, was the longest period of all. It was the time when life went its long, dull way, predictable to the ultimate. Monday, we did the laundry; Tuesday, we did chapel, altar breads, and house-cleaning; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday we did it all again. More of the same. Same old, same old. Week after week, month after month, year after year.

 Every once in a while, of course, life was punctuated by a feast day with its special meals and polyphonic liturgies but, in the end, the normal, the daily predominated. As it does for all of us yet. The commute, the paperwork, the housework, the school run, eat up day after day with mind-numbing regularity. And yet, it is in “ordinary” time that the really important things happen: our children grow up, our marriages and relationships  grow older, our sense of life changes, our vision expands, our soul ripens. No doubt about it, [my father's] prayer card was right: To lose the glory of ordinary time is to suffer the loss of the greater part of life.

Joan Chittister, Ordinary Time

Photo taken from the Evening Standard

Keukenhof Gardens, Netherlands

Good Morning! Here is the daily prayer…

Our Father,

We thank you for the breath-taking beauty in our world. We are amazed at your creativity and the mighty works of your hand. Lord, we ask that you would help us to wake up each day, fully aware of all that is around us. May our eyes, mind and heart, seek out the lovely, the pure, and the true that is in the midst of the bad. Like weeds that can threaten to overtake a lush garden and beautiful flowers, our cares, our pain, and our sin, can overtake us if we’re not careful. May our prayer every morning, regardless of our circumstances be, “Lord, let me find the joy in his day. Let me see the works of your hand all around me. Let there be praise in my heart for who you are and for all you do for us.”

Lord, life is so fleeting and the days and years are gone, like the blink of an eye. We know that our loved ones that have gone on before us, would tell us not to waste our days. They would tell us to live like there’s no tomorrow…to make the most of what we have and to not spend our time looking towards the past. They would tell us to take time to take in the sights, sounds and smells that are around us … to take time to treasure and enjoy those we love. They would tell us not to squander one minute … and to rest in you and appreciate your goodness. We may have pain and we may have sorrows, but there is still joy in the midst of such things, because of You, Lord.

Father, we know that there are so many that are praying with us who are in such hard, lonely, difficult places. We know that you are with them. You are beside them and you are leading them to the still waters and the green pastures. You will restore their souls and though they may feel that they will never smile or feel joy again, you promise that they will. May they close their eyes now and see your face and picture lush green places where their every need is met. May knowing that better days are coming,and that you are their Shepherd, give them peace and comfort today. We bless your name and give you glory and honor Lord. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
Wishing you a safe, peaceful weekend friends!

Blessings be upon you,
Debbie

Our unconscious organizing principles most clearly reveal themselves when we find ourselves stuck,  imagining that our happiness is conditional on having a certain kind of experience, on being or becoming a certain kind of person, or on being treated in some special manner. …Practice allows us discover that our happiness is not dependent on any of the things which we once thought so crucial. The old organizing principles that forever were warning us, “Do it this way or else!” are suddenly found irrelevant. Life offers us the unexpected pleasure in our own aliveness, vitality and responsiveness. Being just this moment, we learn that we don’t have to become anything new, or somehow jettison all those shameful parts of ourselves in order to partake of this newfound bounty.

Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind

Reflective awareness has to be developed through deliberate encouragement and practice, such as through exercises of meditation, because the default is to let assumptions, beliefs, passions and worries lead the mind — because they speak the loudest. So an important piece of  theory is to remember to take the time and create the occasions to bring our wisdom forth. This is how  theory, leads on to practice. Wisdom is not just a matter of refined intellect — psychopaths and dictators can be very cunning — but of our ability to evaluate mind states as they are directly felt in the present.

Ajahn Sucitto, Parami

We are so trained to think of money as our wealth, or ’our capital.‘ But there are so many kinds of ’capital‘ besides money, and some are more available and even more valuable. For example, whenever we gather to make something happen, we need someone who has wisdom capital,

Wayne Muller

As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success,

we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves.

Pema Chodron

Yesterday was the Celtic feast of Imbolc,  celebrated because it is halfway between the winter and the spring solstices. It was marked by  the lighting of fires, and this passed into the important Irish feast of Saint Brigid,  whose monastery kept alight a sacred eternal flame. In a similar way today’s feast, the Christian feast of Candlemas,   traditionally involved a procession of candles and the blessing of candles for use in the home. It would seem that these two celebrations, one older than the other, testify to a need for people to light a fire around this time, to  remind themselves of light and warmth around this midway point of winter, to give some encouragement when the cold and darkness may seem to be never-ending.

It we look closely we see that we too can say – at any moment – that we are midway between two points.  We cannot truly see how the future will develop and we know we have to leave the past behind. We too need moments of light and warmth to encourage us on the way, moments of rest when we nourish our inner self. In this way we announce warmth and light in the dark time of winter. This helps us see that darkness  and not-knowing are natural parts of life’s cycle, just as are periods of cold and lack of growth. Stepping into the dark, into unknown territory,  is necessary from time to time on our journey forward.

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we would like to dream about. The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just keep moving. Usually, when we reach our limit, we  freeze in terror. Our bodies freeze and so do our minds. Rather than indulge or reject our experience, we can somehow let the energy of the emotion, the quality of what we’re feeling pierce us to the heart. This is a noble way to live. It’s the path of compassion – the path of cultivating human bravery and kindheartedness.

Pema Chodron.

We live within a continuum of action and result, in which whatever we do while conscious of doing it leaves a result in the mind. These results may be experienced as the reactions and responses of others, or as effects on our physical well-being, but the deepest result is mental. That is, our actions have a psychological and emotional result that shapes our minds. After all, this is the way we learn: we do something and from the results – from the feedback that other people or our bodies or our own minds give us – we notice whether that action gave us well-being or pain. Through contact, that feedback gets lodged as a memory, a perception or felt meaning. It’s a detail on our psychological road map of how to proceed through life. That detail, a memory, or a piece of behaviour becomes one strand in the weave of our identity. That’s how your mind gets shaped, for good or for ill. And one result ….is the sense of self.

Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma, Self and Liberation

Felt meanings are volatile: they move our hearts and affect how we act. Yet real as it all these feelings seem, they do change; and if I follow them,  then who I seem to be changes in accordance with them. When I am being ‘me, the harassed, overworked’ my manner will have a different flavour than when I’m ‘me, welcoming you to my home.’ Actually, I have quite a few selves, or subsidiary personalities, which take centre stage dependent on the situation, pressures and natural conditions like health. My world-view and motivation may change between one of these personae (these selves that we have within us) and the next – sometimes I can hardly believe it when someone reports back to me what I said when I was in a difficult mood. In fact, I might comment that ‘I wasn’t quite myself then.’ These ranging personae, of which any one can be occupying the ‘me’ space at a given time, are based on felt meanings that arise around one’s role, function, and relationship – as well as on physical health and current attitude. The most residual ones, the ones that really feel like me, are the ones carried in the heart: ‘I am the one who has to do all the work (and receives no recognition)’; ‘I am the one who can’t manage and needs others to make decisions for me…’ and so on. They direct us through event after event, and yet we might not even recognize them as such because the mind will imagine that the feeling is being created not from some internal bias, but from the situation that’s occurring around us.

Ajahn Succitto, Kamma, Self and Liberation

All of life requires a rhythm of rest… but we have lost this essential rhythm. Our culture invariably supposes that action and accomplishment are better than rest, that doing something — anything — is better than doing nothing. Because of our desire to succeed, to meet these ever growing expectations, we do not rest. Because we do not rest, we lose our way. … We miss the compass points that would show us where to go; we bypass the nourishment that would give us succor. We miss the quiet that would give us wisdom. We miss the joy and love born of effortless delight. Poisoned by this hypnotic belief that good things come only through unceasing determination and tireless effort, we can never truly rest.

Wayne Muller, Sabbath

Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself,  a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.  We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past – whether he or she admits it or not -  can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A thrological Aesthetics

Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the

Mary Oliver, Reckless Poem

What would it be like to approach our lives, and to engage in the lives of others, knowing we are all inherently whole, intrinsically well, in need of being drawn forth into the discovery of unabashed completeness? How would this change the entire dance of practitioner and patient? What kind of relationship would be wrought and shaped when seen from, and uncompromisingly held within, this point of view?

Saki Santorelli, Heal Thyself: Lesson on Mindfulness in Medicine

The question is not, never, ever, whether or not we will be given challenges and limitations. We will. The question is, how will we hold them, how will we be changed, how will they shape us, what will we bring to the healing of them, what,  if  anything will be born in its place.

Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having and Doing Enough

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendall Berry, The Real Work

Imagine taking a very small glass of water and putting into it a teaspoon of salt. Because of the small size of the container, the teaspoon of salt is going to have a big impact upon the water. However, if you approach a much larger body of water, such as a lake, and put into it that same teaspoonful of salt, it will not have the same intensity of impact, because of the vastness and openness of the vessel receiving it. Even when the salt remains the same, the spaciousness of the vessel receiving it changes everything. We spend a lot of our lives looking for a feeling of safety or protection; we try to alter the amount of salt that comes our way. Ironically, the salt is the very thing that we cannot do anything about, as life changes and offers us repeated ups and downs. Our true work is to create a container so immense that any amount of salt, even a truckload, can come into it without affecting our capacity to receive it. No situation, even an extreme one, then can mandate a particular reaction.

Sharon Salzberg, LovingKindness

The part of the mind that creates products is not the part of the mind that can grant us any lasting sense of happiness. The narrow often unconscious definition of humanity as primarily a producer and creator of products is fundamentally misconceived.  All good art forms remind us of the broader horizons of existence that make sense of any of its particular artifacts  …..The contemplative disciplines … are simply ways of learning to pay a profound attention to these outer patterns through disciplining the breath and the body at the same time. Eventually we learn not to choose between the inner and the outer world but live at a powerful frontier between these inner and outer correspondences.

David Whyte

Let everything happen to you:

beauty and terror.

Just keep going.

No feeling is final.

Rilke, Book of Hours

Most of the work of the practice then is just about noticing what stimulates, alarms or otherwise pushes our buttons, and working with that. It’s about restraining the free-wheeling mind, turning away from sources of powerful attraction, checking the impulse and reactions, softening the ill-will and tension and widening into the body to release the energy of the activation. And more subtly, it’s about meeting and disengaging the ‘should be’s’. So: I walk up and down my meditation path feeling nothing special and practise staying with that; facing a group of school children and wanting to bring something into their lives that will withstand the floods of commercialism, I hold and relax with that; or, at a management meeting, I listen to the gloomy analysis of the monastery’s finances, without dismissing or panicking over that. Meet it, disengage from the script of it even as you widen to receive its wave – and let that move through you. Then trust what arises within when the self-impression passes.

Ajahn Sucitto, Reflections.

More on n

When we look outward, we solidify the world by projecting onto it attributes that are in no way inherent to it. Looking inward we freeze the flow of consciousness when we conceive of an “I” enthroned between a past that no longer exists and a future that does not yet exist. We take it for granted that we see things as they are and rarely question that opinion. We spontaneously assign intrinsic qualities to things and people “thinking this is beautiful, that is ugly” without realizing that our mind superimposes these attributes upon what we perceive. We divide the world between “desirable” and “undesirable” and see independent entities in what is actually a network of ceaselessly changing relations.

Matthieu Ricard, Happiness

S. 1.61

The meditation orientation is not about fixing pain or making it better. It’s about looking deeply into the nature of pain — making use of it in certain ways that might allow us to grow. In that growing, things will change, and we have the potential to make choices that will move us toward greater wisdom and compassion, including self-compassion, and thus toward freedom from suffering.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, At Home in our Bodies.

You work with what you are given,

Image taken from http://www.videojug.com

In Celtic folk tales a curse that could happen to a person was to get stuck in a field and not be able to get back out of it, to be stuck in that place for ever. It was seen as a definite curse to be unable to venture or to change. We all know this experience in some small way; we all get ourselves stuck in routines and habits that act like shackles. We all refuse to open our eyes to the vision that is before us; too often we select what we hear and what we respond to. The open gate is the opposite of this. It is the invitation to adventure and to grow, the call to be among the living and vital elements of the world. The open gate is the call to explore new areas of yourself and the world around you. It is a challenge to come and discover that the world and ourselves are filled with mystery …. The open gate is the choice that  is always … before us.  It is a sign of the opportunity that is ours.

David Adam, The Open Gate