Mindfulbalance

Written before smartphones, email and the internet.

No inner room to inhabit our own hearts. Greater anxiety gets transferred into endless activity.

We live in a time of no room, which is the time of the end.

The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration

Thomas Merton, The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room, August 1965

If we are willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. 

This is the first step on the path.

Pema Chodron

We can get so caught up in the “drama” of our life and our work that we fail to be present for what is in front of us. How many autumns do we truly experience?

世事一场大梦，人生几度秋凉

The affairs of the world are but a great dream;

how many times do we feel the coolness of autumn?

Su Shi, 1037 -1101, Chinese Song-dynasty poet

Eternity is not somewhere beyond this life. It is this moment when we stop reaching backward and forward. When thought stops measuring time, the eternal is simply what remains: entirely present, always.

Eternity is not infinity.

It is not a long time.

It does not begin at the end of time.

It does not run parallel to time.

In its entirety it always was.

In its entirety it will always be.

It is entirely present always.

Wendell Berry, From Leavings.

Wendell Berry died on Monday aged 92. He was an activist, a poet and a farmer whose poems, as one writer said, “should be read as part of a spiritual practice and as poems, in some sense, devoted to dwelling, to living thoughtfully in one place“