Spending Time

A reflection on our blessings of our Energy and our Attention, and of Grace.

Aiming at the setting sun, the ancient peak of Bencorrbeg holding space just above the waters of Lough Inagh, Connemara

We do not run out of time; we run out of cycles.

We live as if life was inevitable.

We burn our best hours debating over whether to Be or whether to Become, when nature has already shown, has always shown, The Way:

Ebb and Flow. Rise and fall, cycles and seasons.

We spend more time worrying about whether things will come soon enough, lamenting what has passed or fretting about whether we will have enough time, burning the very currency we are trying to save, and thus spend it poorly.

We have two budgets of blessings, Energy and Attention, that we get to invest in every cycle, be that a meal, an hour of time, a conversation, a day, a season, a relationship, or even a Life. We worry about not having enough time, and fail to see the opportunity to invest our two budgets with love, prudence and grace.

We struggle against the currents of the water of our journey, missing the point of the blessing we are carried by and held in at all times.

Your thread is woven into the great tapestry. You are connected to everything and every one.

Come to stillness and embrace that connection and you will see, you belong, you have always belonged and you will always belong. And all those that you war against, the moments of your life you try and escape, they belong too. They are part of you, just as surely as the valley defines the mountain, and the mountain defines the valley.

Celebrate life. Celebrate yourself.

Celebrate beginnings, celebrate endings. Do not miss the beauty in sorrow, do not be deaf to the alive silence of the night when the day has passed nor the ever present invitation to your inheritance that lies at the utter heart of surrender.

It is precisely in our defeats not our triumphs, that we discover the deepest nature of our hearts and the true face of our most private hopes.  It is what the trials of the climb threaten to take from you that frame with pristine clarity the connection we have to any meaning me might come to in life.

The world can do with more mindful guides, and less mindless vandals, of the natural countryside of flow and grace.  Simply being the Way, can do more in pointing the Way to others than all the preaching and rule-making in the world.

The question is not whether or not we have enough time, it is about how we spend the energy and attention, the love and consciousness, the Eros and Psyche we have, in our gifted moments.

Cycles and Seasons.

We are invited into the conversation with life, which is itself The Way, through the symmetry between the ebb and flow of the seasonality within us and the seasonality in the World, reminding again and again and again of the wisdom and grace of seasonality itself.

In every life there is a season for retreating, for seeking refuge within, for being small, and cradling the child of the world, for grieving, for forgiveness, for facing the small death of letting go, to prepare for rebirth.

WINTER

The retreating 
into the roots 
of oneself 
is not the losing of your name 
in a winter of resignation 
or a shying from the sun, 
but the casting off the vibrant leaves of 
who you were yesterday 
the practicing of letting go 
and the dwelling in the inner stillness 
so that you can learn grace, 
grow, 
and not just greet the sky come spring, 
but be the shining light 
at the very heart of the resplendence 
as your own new life blooms 
and sings it’s part in the great chorus,
to the ready ears 
of a world that was always waiting 
for your voice.

© Rocco Jarman

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The photo was taken by me after a four hour hike through the Twelve Bens and Mamturks mountain ranges in Connemara towards the homely Lough Inagh inn, nestled on the shores of Lough Inagh. Walking the land is an ancient tradition, and a way to touch and be touched again by, the power of grace, which itself is nothing but the gentle enduring patience of Life.

There was a feasting and merriment going on in the dining hall, beautiful music and beautiful company of fellow pilgrims all in the very heart of their own sacred journeys home, and yet I was drawn outside again and again, to marvel at everything and nothing in particular; to be witnessed in my witnessing of the humbling spectacle of the Great Secret, unfolded and unfolding at the same time without and deep within me.