“The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so”, Ralph Waldo Emerson says, ” but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger and mosquitoes and silly people.”
Joan Chittister, O.S.B., American Benedictine nun.
The Buddha takes something like suffering, (dukkha), and says it’s a Noble Truth. This was an astounding thing to be doing because humans think that suffering is a nasty fact of life, and we want to get rid of it. So we’re always running around trying to find happiness and security in the things that are always changing, and of course we end up suffering more. So just changing the attitude towards suffering is what the Buddha did. Not to get rid of it or blame it on anybody, but to recognize it. Then you’re no longer looking at suffering from aversion and wanting to get rid of it or blaming it on somebody else, but seeing what it actually is in the present moment: formations arising and ceasing. That’s brilliant!
Ajahn Sumedho, Remembering Tan Ajahn Buddhadāsa
Today is the Autumn Equinox, which is celebrated as a public holiday in Japan.
Imitate the trees.
Learn to lose in order to recover,
and remember that nothing stays the same for long,
not even pain.
May Sarton, 1912 – 1995, Belgian-American poet and novelist.
In meditation we’re learning from Nature rather than from society, so you have to train in terms of wilderness awareness: to learn from your bodily intelligence. Otherwise, if you’re trying to get your business-model, ‘get it done’ mind, to take you to samādhi (concentration or calm) it’s like riding an elephant as if you’re driving a taxi: you implant stress onto a natural process and that constricts your awareness.
Ajahn Sucitto
May whatever circumstances that arise serve the awakening of compassion.
Buddhist Aspiration quoted by Tara Brach, Radical Compassion in Challenging Times
When life does not in any way add up, we must turn to the part of us that has never wanted a life of simple calculation. To be consoled is to be invited into the terrible ground of beauty upon which our inevitable disappearance stands, to a voice that does not soothe falsely, but touches the epicenter of our pain or articulates the essence of our loss, and then emancipates us into the privilege of both life and death as equal birthrights.
Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part. Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.
David Whyte
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