Wind warnings

A storm is predicted for today with very high winds on the West coast of Ireland. We live in an inner and outer world that is always changing, but give a lot of importance to the things which pass through each day. We can be blown out of control, ceaselessly worrying about the past (which cannot be changed) or the future (which exists only in our imagination).  Our practice to find a still place: the mind that knows movement does not, in itself, move.

One windy day two monks were arguing about a flapping banner. The first said, “I say the banner is moving, not the wind.” The second said, “I say the wind is moving, not the banner.” A third monk passed by and said, “The wind is not moving. The banner is not moving. Your minds are moving.”

Raymond Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near

Be here now

When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you’re not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You’re drinking your projects, you’re drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Sunday Quote: Cycles of learning

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

Posted in Uncategorized

Clutter

The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.

May Sarton, New Year Resolve

Appreciate

Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.

Anton Chekhov

The heart

If I make a metaphor of my body,
it’s a desert. One part longing,

one part need, the rest withstanding. Of course
I would prefer to be thirsty

for nothing.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli, American poet