If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live.
If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.
Thomas Merton, Love and Living
What’s our focus
Month: November 2020
Complaint
Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.
Pema Chodron
Our relationship to what is
No matter how much we like or dislike, or are hurt or maimed by a thought, action or event, our attitudes do not colour the event itself, only our relationship to it.
As this is so, no matter how much we stomp or shout or cajole or whine, reality is what it is. In this is sacredness and dignity.
Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi, Cutting the Cat Into One: the Practice of the Bodhisattva Precepts
Courage
The realm of heroism doesn’t lie in outward action; it is within us, where we form our attitude towards things, that the hero is born, not in the deeds that he or she does to save the world. Every human being who gets up in the morning and forms a positive attitude to overcome their obstacles and live in the face of the destructive forces around them is a hero. And they will always be a hero, whether they succeed or fail, because the hero is already there in the attitude, regardless of whether they live or die in the context of all the forces that would drag us down.
The hero starts here, and starts now, by saying, yes – I can Be. I can have a wish for the good.
Lee van Laer, Parabola Magazine
Sunday Quote: Celebrate this Day
May anxiety never linger about you. May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul. Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul. May you experience each day as a sacred gift, woven around the heart of wonder.
John O’Donohue, For Presence
The strength to survive
In the light of all that is happening this year and this week, we all need to keep our hopes alive
There is an Ethiopian legend about a shepherd boy Alemayu that speaks to me of the power of hope. Alemayu had to spend the night on a bitterly cold mountain. He had only a very thin cloth to wear. To the amazement of all the villagers, he returned alive and well. When they asked him how he survived, he replied: ” ‘The night was bitter. When all the sky was dark, I thought I would die. Then far, far off I saw a shepherd’s fire on another mountain. I kept my eyes on the red glow in the distance, and I dreamed of being warm. And that is how I had the strength to survive.
Each one of us has a “shepherd’s fire on another mountain” that has kept our hope alive. This fire has given us the courage to recover our lost self and believe in the dreams that stir in our soul.
Joyce Rupp, Dear Heart, Come Home
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