“Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars  of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,  the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders  of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is  nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned  in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side  is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world  you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it  against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”

these challenging times speak to letting go and to the profound lessons of impermanence, compassion, and grief that can be learned as Mary Oliver muses in her poem quoted above…

may we learn to appreciate both nature’s wrath and beauty, understanding our place in the balance of things…

“Be completely empty. Be perfectly serene. The ten thousand things arise together; in their arising is their return. Now they flower, and flowering sink homeward, returning to the root. The return to the root is peace. Peace: to accept what must be, to know what endures. In that knowledge is wisdom. Without it, ruin, disorder. To know what endures is to be openhearted, magnanimous, regal, blessed, following the Tao, the way that endures forever. The body comes to its ending, but there is nothing to fear.” ~ Verse 16, Tao Te Ching ~

“Death, whether our own or others, can be a powerful gateway to complete tenderness. The confrontation with the impermanence of all things is perhaps the widest gate to liberation from suffering. Facing death or dealing with death, our sight becomes clear. ‘Priorities and omissions are etched in a merciless light,’ as Audre Lorde wrote. Given the sheer quantity of death around us, why not use this merciless light to better see who we are?”

~ Zenju Earthlyn Manuel ~

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