Your notions of happiness may be very dangerous. Happiness can only be possible in the here and now. Go back and examine deeply your notions and ideas of happiness. So let go of what you believed yesterday. Let go of what you thought last week you needed to be happy. The conditions of happiness that are in your life now are enough.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Do not judge each day
by the harvest you reap
but by the seeds
that you plant.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence, there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling in the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have not rest, God does not bless our work. If we twist our lives out of shape in order to fill every corner of them with action and experience, God will seem silently to withdraw from our hearts and leave us empty.
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
photo : jon rawlinson
Coming back to the present moment takes some effort, but the effort is very light. The instruction is to “touch and go.” We touch thoughts by acknowledging them as thinking and then we let them go. It’s a way of relaxing our struggle, like touching a bubble with a feather. It’s a non-aggressive approach to being here.
Pema Chodron
Photo: brokeninaglory
The way of Wisdom is not the way of why, but the way of what. The Hebrew word [for wisdom] “chochma” can be read as choch mah, “what is”. Wisdom will not tell you why things are the way they are, but will show you what they are and how you can live in harmony with them
Rabbi Rami Shapiro, The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature
At my feet the white-petalled daisies display
the small suns of their center piece, their – if you don’t
mind my saying so – their hearts.
Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots.
What do I know?
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example – I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field
Mary Oliver, Daisies
