Who makes these changes?
I shoot and arrow right, it lands left
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a boar.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in myself.
I should be suspicious
of what I want.
Rumi
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.
To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.
Pema Chodron
photo mike baird
The most prophetic thing Thomas Merton ever did was to say to a Louisville shopkeeper who asked him what brand of toothpaste he preferred, “I don’t care”. Merton was intrigued and troubled by the store clerk’s response. “He almost dropped dead” he wrote, “I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or something with five colours. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn’t care about the secret ingredient ….the worst thing you can do now is not care about these things”
This not-caring attitude is important to hold onto these days and still prophetic, because the ultimate goal of the marketer is to have us see consumer products not as mere things, but as keys to our identity. Brands are marks that owners out on their property, often by painful means, and we are in perilous territory when our self-image, and even our self-worth, is founded on which brands and labels we can afford to purchase and display.
Kathleen Norris, The Secret Ingredient
The root of joy is gratefulness…
It is not joy that makes us grateful;
it is gratitude that makes us joyful
David Steindl rast
Often we want to be able to see into the future. We say, “How will next year be for me? Where will I be five or ten years from now?” There are no answers to these questions. Mostly we have just enough light to see the next step: what we have to do in the coming hour or the following day. The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark. When we are able to take the next step with trust that we will have enough light for the step that follows, we can walk through life with joy and be surprised at how far we go. Let’s rejoice in the little light we carry and not ask for the great beam that would take all shadows away.
Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey
photo Timo Newton-syms
The soul, like the moon,
is now, and always new again.
And I have seen the ocean
continuously creating.
Since I scoured my mind
and my body, I too, Lalla,
am new, each moment new.
My teacher told me one thing,
live in the soul.
When that was so,
I began to go naked,
and dance.
Lalla, Kasmiri poet and mystic, 1320 – 1392
Original Kasmiri translated by Coleman Banks
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