Often in our life we are distracted, we forget what really counts. We lose ourselves, our soul. We feel impoverished and estranged. I the Grail story, a king is sick, ad all around him nature is dying: springs dry up, plants die. All kinds of people try to help him, but they all seem to miss the point.

This king is cured only when a young stranger of humble birth, Parsifal, asks him: “Where is the Grail?” Then nature blooms again, the springs flow. Sometimes it only takes asking the right question. It is like saying: “Where is my soul? What is essential, what is so precious, so vital, that if I lose it I become a living corpse and the world around me a ghost town? Where is my soul?” That is perhaps the only question worth answering. That is our life search.

Beauty has a lot to do with our plight and may be, if not the answer itself, a potent aid that leads us to discovery. It is really very simple. To lose beauty means to become ill.To meet it again, face-to-face, means to find again the part of ourselves we should never forget. It means to be healed. 

~John O’Donohue

it’s all so much more poignant right now…..like the last roses of the season….

inquiry for today~ what do you notice passing away?

how we know how to miss the passing seasons

Let the apple ripen on the branch beyond your need to take it down.

Let the coolness of autumn and the breathing, blowing wind test its adherence to endurance,

let the others fall. Wait longer than you would, go against yourself, find the pale nobility of quiet

that ripening demands; watch with patience as the silhouette emerges and the leaves fall;

see it become a solitary roundness against a greying sky, let winter come and the first frost threaten,

and then wake one morning to see the breath of winter has haloed its redness with light.

So that a full two months after you should have taken the apple down you hold it in your closed hand

at last and bite into the cool sweetness spread evenly through every single atom

of a pale and yielding structure. So that you taste on that cold, grey day, not only the after reward

of a patience remembered, not only the summer sunlight of a postponed perfection,

but the sweet inward stillness of the wait itself.

~David Whyte