A Feast of Being

I always love finding a kindred spirit; kindred in words, in viewing the world.  My happy discovery of the week is Mary Rose O’Reilley, who I would be honored to spend some quiet time with out in the garden, on such a day as this, contemplating and honoring nature.

It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me.  And then I found an extraordinary bouquet.  Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything."  Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral.

All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way.  Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along.  A feast of being.

—Mary Rose O’Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World:  The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

 

image:  Milkweed, The Woods Are Lovely, Dark, and Deep