Month: May 2018

Simple routine

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It’s a holiday Monday here…easier to start the week with gentle routines

The search is the meaning, the search for beauty, love, kindness and restoration in this difficult, wired and often alien modern world. The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be. This idea overwhelms some people. I have found that the wonder of life is often most easily recognizable through habits and routines – If you don’t do ritual things in order, the paper doesn’t read as well, and you’ll be thrown off the whole day. But when you can sit for a while at your table, reach for your coffee, look out the window at the sky or some branches, then back down at the paper or a book, everything feels right for the moment, which is maybe all we have.

Anne Lamott

Sunday quote: Nurturing love

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What you help a child to love

can be more important 

than what you help him to learn

African Proverb

Inner worth

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God has given you one face,

and you make yourselves another.

 William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Inward

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Samsara [the ongoing cycle of unsatisfactory experience]

is mind turned outwardly, lost in its projections;

nirvana is mind turned inwardly,

recognizing its nature.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

Underneath your fears, your original face

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Who are you? Never mind all your fears and insecurities or all the things you have or would like to have. Forget that you want to be a better person.  I’m not asking who you believe yourself to be, but rather what you experience in those moments when you are not caught up in your wants and fears. What do you rely on to give meaning to your life? 

Even if you never consciously grapple with these questions about your true nature, certain circumstances will require you to pay attention. Life delivers you a series of challenges in the form of small and large good fortune, as well as petty and great misfortune. In the struggle to learn how to respond to the resulting joy, pain, and confusion, you are repeatedly challenged to seek and to act from your essence.

Phillip Moffit,  The Language of the Soft Heart

 

Once thoughts are quieted, the Original Face appears. Thoughts can be compared to clouds. When clouds vanish, the moon appears. The moon of suchness is the Original Face. Thoughts are also like the fogging of a mirror. When you wipe away all condensation, a mirror reflects clearly. Quiet your thoughts and behold your Original Face before you were born!

Daito, Zen Master, (1282-1337)

Repeating

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I asked the poet Tony Hoagland what he thought about fear. He said fear was the ghost of an experience: we fear the recurrence of a pain we once felt, and in this way fear is like a hangover. The memory of our pain is a pain unto itself, and thus feeds our fear like a foyer with mirrors on both sides.

And then he quoted Auden: “And ghosts must do again/What gives them pain.”

Mary Ruefle, On Fear