Seeing into darkness is clarity.
Knowing how to yield is strength.
Use your own light
and return to the source of light.
This is called practicing eternity.
Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching 52
Month: June 2020
The extra tension in the mind
Suffering can be differentiated from pain. There is pain in life, without doubt, but suffering is the extra tension in the mind that is unable to accommodate change and accept the truth of its experience.
The first two noble truths are that life is difficult and that suffering is the tension in the mind that insists an experience be different from the way it is.
It’s the imperative in the mind that this moment be different that causes our suffering
Sylvia Boorstein, Greet this moment as a Friend
Forget definition
The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself — forget definition, forget assumption, watch.
We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.
No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous.
Marilynne Robinson, 1943 – , American novelist and essayist, Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred
More than your sorrow
The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.
Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful…
How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow?
It is natural – you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Sunday Quote: Aware
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world
Mary Oliver
No solid ground
The Himalayan legend says
there are beautiful white birds
that live completely in flight.
They are born in the air,
must learn to fly before falling
and die also in their flying.
Maybe you have been born
into such a life
with the bottom dropping out.
Maybe gravity is claiming you
and you feel
ghost-scripted.
For the one who lives inside the fall,
the sky beneath the sky of all.
Jennifer K Sweeney, In Flight
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