Year: 2013

Resting the mind

Karl Duffy4 Comments

File:Camara hpE327 155.jpg

All mental activity, all these choices and possibilities, is confusing and even exhausting. Just as the body needs regular rest, so does the mind. To rest the mind in complete stillness, in pure awareness, is to return it to its original nature, its natural state. We don’t need to narrate all the events of our life. We don’t need the mind to comment internally on everything and everyone we encounter. This narration, these comments, separates us from just experiencing life as it is.

Jan Chozen Bays, How to Train a Wild Elephant

Not limiting

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Zeď2005.jpg

When you are identified on the level of “I am the body and I am my feelings, thoughts and memories”, you’re always limiting, binding yourself to unsatisfactory conditions. These conditions can never satisfy you, because they’re changing: when you try to find security and lasting happiness in things that are forever changing, you’re going to be terribly disappointed. You going to feel this… sense of lack, and we tend to take that as a very personal flaw: “There’s something wrong with me. What’s wrong with me that I should feel lonely, inadequate, incomplete, or unfulfilled?“

Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of SIlence

A tolerance for not knowing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Rock garden, Portland Japanese Garden.jpg

John Keats, the great English Romantic poet, writing  about the qualities needed for  full openness to the infinite depth of the world and of the person:

When man is capable of being in uncertainties,

Mysteries, doubts,

without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Letter to George and Tom Keats,  December 1817

photo: heather

…and seeing its true meaning

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Farmer plowing in Fahrenwalde, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany.jpg

Every person, in the course of his life, must build — starting with the natural territory of his own self — a work, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout all his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time  narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world.

 Teilhard de Chardin

photo ralf roletschek

Paying attention to our work….

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Rocker in the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill.jpg

The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact

that it was made by someone capable of believing

that an angel might come and sit on it.

Thomas Merton

photo carl wycoff, Shaker Village,  Pleasant Hill.

….and learning

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Buteo regalis -California -flying-8.jpg

Each thing — each stone, blossom, child— is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

 Rilke,  The Book of Hours