Some events, like hearing a bird singing early this morning, make it easy to be fully present. We are not remembering another bird, another moment.
I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of inflections
or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
photo m.betley
What does it mean to see each other exactly as we are? Past memories about ourselves and each other are not how we are right now. Memory is an incomplete and inaccurate recording of the past. Now is something entirely different. Quietly looking and listening now is not memory. It is an entirely different mode of being, It is a cleansing of perception.
Toni Packer, The Work of this Moment
There is no expected pace for inner learning. What we need to learn comes when we need it, no matter how old or young, no matter how many times we have to start over, no matter how many times we have to learn the same lesson. We fall down as many times as we need to , to learn how to fall and get up. We fall in love as many times as we need to , to learn how to hold and be held. We suffer pain as often as is necessary for us to learn how to break and how to heal. No one really likes this of course, but we deal with our dislike in the same way, again and again, until we learn what we need to know about the humility of acceptance.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
In daily life your mind is filled with expectations that largely determine which events you pay attention to and how you interpret them. Most of the time you are unconscious of your expectations, yet they control much of what you do and pose an obstacle to how you live your intentions. As you become mindful of expectations, you start to see how they dominate your life choices and colour your perception. Expectations assume a certain result and are future-based. They hold your present sense of well-being hostage to a future that may or may not happen.
Philipp Moffitt in A Year of Living Mindfully
Prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
photo Al Jazeera
We pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye, clear.
What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
photo rspb
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