A lot of what we hold on to as important- even just a week or two ago – turns out to be, like everything else, impermanent, arising and passing away according to conditions.
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be
Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook
photo albert bridge
One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game. It can be quite disorienting to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true – it actually never was true. Not now not ever. There is another form of obsolescence that can fray at the cocoon we have spun about ourselves, that is, the story was true at one time, and for an extended period; the story was even true and good to us, but now it is no longer true and no longer of any benefit, in fact our continued retelling of it simply imprisons us.
David Whyte
photo Uwe H. Friese
Life has no meaning.
Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life.
It is a waste to be asking the question
when you are the answer.
Joseph Campbell
Most of us wonder from time to time how to give meaning to some days:
A Lord asked Takuan how he might pass the time, as his days were long in the office,
sitting stiffly to receive the homage of others.
Takuan wrote these 8 Chinese characters and gave them to him:
“Not twice this day
Inch time foot gem
This day will not come again
Each minute is worth a priceless gem”
Takuan Sōhō 1573 – 1645, Japanese Zen Buddhist Master
photo Lorenz Kerscher
The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking,
it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
photo of Tibetan prayer wheel, Etnografiska museum, Stockholm
The first week back to work over. Nature has a gentler pace than the one imposed by our minds and seems to have different phases – growth, slowing down, covering over and rest. Thus, despite all the clamour to change we hear in these first weeks, we can choose to have some natural rest and a time of quiet, not always striving – allowing the different parts of our lives to just be .
You begin to see that there are seasons in your life, in the same way as there as seasons in nature. There are times to cultivate, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally there are those times that are cold and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.
Chogram Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule
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