Not needing to know

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We just need to remember to practice relaxing into our life, in all its joys and sorrows, and to relinquish the need to know what’s going to happen next. The third element of patience is acceptance of the truth, meaning that we accept our experience as it is – with all its suffering – rather than how we want it to be. We recognize that because our experience is continually changing, we don’t need it to be different than it is. This acceptance of  “things as they are” requires profound wisdom and compassion, which takes a long time to evolve; we must therefore develop a long-enduring mind that will enable us to understand time from a radically new perspective.

Michele McDonald, Finding Patience

Always new

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I have discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color – something which exists before all forms and colors appear.  This is a very important point.  No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea…  But if you are always prepared for accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing... then at that moment you will have perfect composure.

Suzuki Shunryū, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Holding a space

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How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.

Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

What is actually happening

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When we put down ideas of what life should be like,
we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.
Tara Brach

The smallest thing

 

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To study a single speck of dust is to study the whole universe

Dogen, 1200 –  1253

And he also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand. It seemed to me as round as a ball. I gazed at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ The answer came thus, ‘It is everything that is made.’ I marveled how this could be, for it was so small it seemed it might fall suddenly into nothingness. Then I heard the answer, ‘It lasts, and ever shall last, because God loves it. All things have their being in this way.’

Julian of Norwich, 1342 – 1416,  Revelations of Divine Love

photo US National Archives and Records Administration: Records of the Environmental Protection Agency

Sunday Quote: Marvellous

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In all things in nature

there is something

of the marvellous

Aristotle

photo wing-chi poon