What is this message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves- that the world is wild, that life is unpredictable in its goodness and its danger, that the world is larger than your imagination.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting lost
In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.
Blaise Pascal
More from Chuang Tzu, just to start the month in a Taoist frame of mind:
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free.
Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.
This is the ultimate.
The effect of life in society is to complicate our existence,
making us forget who we really are,
by causing us to become obsessed
with what we are not
Chuang Tzu, 4th Century BC, Inner Chapters
The teachings about recognizing egolessness sound quite abstract, but the path quality of that, the magic instruction that we have all received, the golden key is that part of the meditation technique where you recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, “Thinking.” Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather – the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know that.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions?
For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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