Month: December 2016

Sunday Quote: The mind of winter

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winter-trees

I love the feel of winter, when things are stripped back, and we can see the bare outlines of trees and branches. Wallace Stevens reminds us “One must have the mind of winter”.  As we look around at the rush and the celebrations, we can ask “what is really worth celebrating”? We end up being busy, running after experiences but somehow losing our ability to play. 

Where is the Life 
we have lost in living? 
Where is the wisdom 
we have lost in knowledge? 
Where is the knowledge we have lost 
in information?

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

The sun and the moon and the stars

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File:Moon rises above the trees at the Mississippi River Headwaters, May 19, 2016.jpg

From the 17th to the 23rd of December a special sequence of invocations have been used since at least the 5th Century.  Today’s one – “O Wisdom,  Come to teach us the way of prudence” – reflects the age-old quest for a  balanced way of being,  that will lead to our hearts being fulfilled,  faced with all the demands on our time.

Every day we bump into things that challenge us to keep our hearts soft when fears and disappointments try to convince us to harden and close down. The temptation is to say “What can we do? It is as it is” .  However, this never-ending wisdom practice consists in keeping open to experience in all its changing forms  – its joys and its sorrows – having the courage to meet whatever comes our way with a spacious heart. We dare to believe in the underlying mystery, behind the busyness of the day.  Things may change, the attitude of the heart doesn’t:

The water in the stream may have changed many times,

but the reflection of the moon and the stars remains the same.

Rumi

Not stuck

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File:22 août 2010, photo Régis Marzin.jpg

The main attitude on the path to peace is to accept whatever our experience brings. When we speak of not indulging or not suppressing, it doesn’t mean we don’t use our discriminating intelligence. It simply means we are not reacting from a vague or fearful state where the intelligence is enslaved by our hopes and fears

Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through: Buddhist Teachings on Awakening to Our Natural Intelligence

photo marzin regis

How past and future cause problems

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File:Timex Quartz 02h36m06s.jpg

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.

This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be.

The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form.

Both are illusions.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Passing through

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frost

It’s pointless to try to find peace through nullifying or erasing the sense world.

Peace only comes through not giving that world more substantiality or more reality than it actually possesses.

Ajahn Amaro

A way of holding

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File:Noah's hand.jpg

More on butterflies and lightness in dealing with the daily events, or more precisely, the thoughts they give rise to :

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished into the world.

Mary Oliver, One or Two Things

photo andre engels