Month: June 2020

Quality time with yourself

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951–1959

Light

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

If you discover a very thick and deep shadow,

be sure that there is, somewhere within you, a great light.

You must learn to use one to reach the other.

Mirra Alfassa, 1878 – 1973, collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

Working with the conditions

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away.

Not ever.

The only way out is in.

 Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The need to dominate

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Spoken 40 years ago but still applies to what is happening today…

I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

Ursula K Le Guin, A Left handed Commencement Address, Mills College 1983

Moments to reflect

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Difficult things provoke all your  irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface.  And that becomes the moment of truth.  You have the choice to launch into your lousy habitual patterns, or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you.

Pema Chodron

Sunday Quote: Not to plan

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Just because things hadn’t gone the way I had planned

didn’t necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

Ann Patchett, 1963 – American author.