The “10,000 is things”expression for all that happens in a life, or in the world of our experience. They arise and pass away, continually rearranging themselves, and we have to learn how to work with this reality:
The ten thousand things arise together;
In their arising is their return.
Now they flower, and flowering sink homeward, returning to the root.
The return to the root is peace.
Peace: to accept what must be
and to know what endures.
In that knowledge is wisdom
Lao Tzu
You don’t have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister Eckhart said very beautifully, “God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.” You don’t do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free.
Anthony de Mello, sj.
photo paul nelhams
The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.
Rabindranath Tagore
Everything has two endings – a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.
Before a life, air.
And after.
As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.
So it was when love slipped inside us.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.
Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not
Jane Hirshfield, born 1953, American poet: Come, Thief: Poems
photo brian robert marshall
We often ask, “What’s wrong?”
Doing so we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger and depression and produce more such seeds. We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us.
We should learn to ask “What is not wrong?” and be in touch with that.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step
When you are compassionate with yourself,
you trust in your soul,
which you let guide your life.
Your soul knows the geography of your destiny
better than you do.
John O’Donohue
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