As it is

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Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone should behave. But it is not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.
Ajahn Sumedho.
photo simon carey

Dropping our efforts

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Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don’t have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don’t you experience it? Because you’ve got to drop something. You’ve got to drop illusions. You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!

Anthony de Mello sj

Not wasting moments

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Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

photo: martin dawes

Sunday Quote: What is important

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What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments,

but what is woven into the lives of others.

Pericles, Greek Statesman, Orator and General,  495 – 429 BC

photo rod waddington

What Holiness is

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This is, I think, what holiness is:

the natural world, where every moment is full
of the passion to keep moving.

Inside every mind there’s a hermit’s cave full of light,
full of snow, full of concentration.

I’ve knelt there, and so have you,
hanging on to what you love,

to what is lovely.

Mary Oliver, At the Lake

photo of St. Finbar’s Oratory, Gougane Barra by (WT shared) Spircle at wts Wikivoyage

Letting things unfold

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Leave everything as it is, in fundamental simplicity,

and clarity will arise by itself.

Only by doing nothing

will you do all there is to be done.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

phot randi hausken