What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.
David Whyte, The Winter of Listening [extract]
Don’t know
Year: 2021
The nature of things
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
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
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
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
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
Mindfulbalance 