Year: 2018

The story of me, myself and I

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What does wakefulness mean? It means resting in a kind of awareness that is so stable that it’s not thrown off by the comings and goings of events within the field of awareness. So that you don’t lose your balance when things go this way and things go that way, but you actually stay grounded when things go your way, as we put it. And when things don’t go your way, it doesn’t mean that you have to rocket yourself or spiral into depression and hopelessness and a sense of despair. But very often if we take it personally and we feel like our successes say that we’re a good person and then, by extrapolation, our failures say that there’s something wrong with me, that I’m no good. And both of those are wrong. What goes up also comes down, whether we’re talking about the stock market or a ball that you throw up in the air. And if you mistake what you think of as the reality for the reality, then you’re going to suffer because you’re attaching the story of me, myself, and my successes and my failures to something that’s actually quite impersonal.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Interview with Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith

Something is always far away.

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We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it,  rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire……. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Beyond

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For to know nothing is nothing,

not to want to know anything likewise,

but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything,

that is when peace enters in.

Samuel Beckett, Molloy

The unknown is an answer

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It was in the process of asking that I came upon a truth:

that the unknown is an answer.

That there are answers upon answers,

and sometimes no questions at all.

Mary Oliver, Breakage

Winds may blow

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Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes  Oh, “this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking”. As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space – which is the mind’s natural clarity – begins to expand and settle.

Yongey Mingpur Rinpoche

Sunday Quote: Trust the process

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La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.

The path provides the natural next step.

Spanish palindrome – reading the same backwards as forwards.  It is on the subject of pilgrimage or life’s journey , which, as we walk, returns us to our origins