More encouragement to discover our inner strength and beauty, this time in the poetry of Kabir:
Don’t go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.
Kabir, Translated from the Hindi by Robert Bly
photo photdharma
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling in the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. If we have no silence, God is not heard in our music.
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
photo Helgi halldorsson
We do not meditate in order to be comfortable. In other words, we don’t meditate in order to always, all the time, feel good. I imagine shockwaves are passing through you as you read this, because so many people come to meditation to simply “feel better.” However, the purpose of meditation is not to feel bad, you’ll be glad to know. Rather, meditation gives us the opportunity to have an open, compassionate attentiveness to whatever is going on. The meditative space is like the big sky — spacious, vast enough to accommodate anything that arises.
Pema Chodron, 5 Reasons to Meditate
photo Thamizhpparithi maari
Things are as they are.
Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars,
nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
Alan Watts
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life
as in hoping for another life
and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus
photo Håkon Dahlmo
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