Surprising

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We never start to be grateful unless we wake up. Wake up to what? To surprise. As long as nothing surprises us, we walk through life in a daze. We need to practice waking up to surprise. I suggest using this simple question as a kind of alarm clock: “Isn’t this surprising?” “Yes, indeed!” will be the correct answer, no matter when and where and under what circumstances you ask this question. After all, isn’t it surprising that there is anything at all, rather than nothing? Ask yourself at least twice a day, “Isn’t this surprising?” and you will soon be more awake to the surprising world in which we live.

David Steindl-Rast, Awake, Aware and Alert

photo tony hisgett

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All we can wish for

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There is really only one possible prayer:
Give me to do everything that I do in the day
with a sense of the sacredness of life.
Tomorrow the world crashes in again.

May Sarton, Journal of A Solitude

photo project manhattan

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Just like this

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If you ask someone who is swimming in water, ‘What is water like?’, then they simply bring attention to it and say, ‘Well, it feels like this. It’s this way.’ Then you ask, ‘How is it exactly? Is it wet or cold or warm or hot…?’ All of these words can describe it. Water can be cold, warm, hot, pleasant, unpleasant… But it’s just like this. The realm we’re swimming in for a lifetime is this way! It feels like this! You feel it! Sometimes it’s pleasant. Sometimes it’s unpleasant. Most of the time it’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant. But always it’s just this way. Things come and go and change, and there’s nothing that you can depend on as being totally stable. [It’s] all energy and change and movement; all flux and flow.

Now we’re not judging it; we’re not saying it’s good or it’s bad, or you should like it, or you shouldn’t; we’re just bringing attention to it –  like the water.

Ajahn Sumedho

Working with today

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Accept – then act.

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

Always work with it, not against it

Eckhart Tolle

photo pygarcia

Sunday Quote: The dance

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Life dances and you have to dance with it, whether it is taking you on a wonderful ride or is stepping on your toes. This is the necessary price and transcendent gift of being incarnate; alive in a body. Each moment is a fresh moment in the dance, and if you are lost in clinging to the past or clinging to your fears of the future, you are not present for the dance.

Philip Moffitt

photo cindy funk

New adventures

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It is a sign of great inner insecurity

to be hostile to the unfamiliar

Anais Nin

photo leo hidalgo