Month: October 2021

The nature of things

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The nature of experience itself is change and movement, and this is why so many of us find that we’re to one degree or another being knocked off balance and losing our sense of equanimity. The entire world seems to be shifting, and it seems to be happening very, very quickly. So if we’re looking for a relative stillness, if we’re looking for all of this change and movement to stop, we’re always going to be frustrated, because this kind of stillness is elusive, very hard to maintain, and it can slip away in any given moment. Instead of trying to control our minds or environments by contracting or hiding in order to find this inner stillness, we must throw our senses wide open – listening, feeling, seeing – and become very wide and vast.

When you welcome all of experience into your awareness, a certain type of stillness starts to emerge organically. 

Adyashanti

Holding plans lightly

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Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.

I should be suspicious
Of what I want.

Rumi

Sunday Quote: Complete

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There is not a fragment in all nature,

for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself

John Muir

Saturday silence

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Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence.

It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything

Adrienne Rich, Cartographies of Silence, 3 and 7 [extracts]

Courage

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There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us:

we suffer more often in imagination than in reality

Seneca the Younger, Letters from a Stoic

Nurture not force

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Once in a while we meet a gentle person. Gentleness is a virtue hard to find in a society that admires toughness and roughness. We are encouraged to get things done and to get them done fast, even when people get hurt in the process. Success, accomplishment, and productivity count. But the cost is high. There is no place for gentleness in such a milieu. Gentle is the one who does ‘not break the crushed reed, or snuff the faltering wick.’ Gentle is the one who is attentive to the strengths and weaknesses of the other and enjoys being together more than accomplishing something. A gentle person treads lightly, listens carefully, looks tenderly, and touches with reverence. A gentle person knows that true growth requires nurture, not force. Let’s dress ourselves with gentleness. 

Henri Nouwen