Year: 2021

Not putting labels

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By teaching “Do not judge” (Matthew 7:1), the great teachers are saying that you cannot start seeing or understanding anything if you start with “no.” You have to start with a “yes” of basic acceptance, which means not too quickly labeling, analyzing, or categorizing things as in or out, good or bad, up or down. You have to leave the field open, a field in which God and grace can move. Ego leads with “no” whereas soul leads with “yes.”

The ego seems to strengthen itself by constriction, by being against things; and it feels loss or fear when it opens up. “No” always comes easier than “yes,” and a deep, conscious “yes” is the work of freedom and grace. So the soul lives by expansion instead of constriction.

Richard Rohr

Deeper growth

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We cannot say that we would have chosen much of what has happened this past year, but when things go well, we rarely stop to ask questions about our lives. A difficult situation, however, means we can see reality in a fresh way….

Even when we don’t desire it,
God is ripening.

Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 16

Surrender

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Surrender to the way things want to happen next, even though this often involves a vast and terrifying loss of control.

Trust the magic that was born into your soul.

Martha Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World

Freely given

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I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be.

We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.

Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

Sunday Quote: Patience

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Sometimes it takes time for the meaning of things to emerge or for us to develop a deeper understanding.

The ox is slow, but the earth is patient.

Indonesian Proverb (or maybe, as some say, Chinese)

Present and fundamentally kind

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Zen speaks of “expressing a dream within a dream”, acknowledging that we never quite rid ourselves of delusion and confusion, yet we can be present and fundamentally kind. There is so much bounty, so many tangled and twining vines, as well as so much lostness. Practice isn’t abut escaping any of it. It is about putting our feet on the ground, feeling the moist grass, knowing the wet stream of tears on a cheek…and not wandering off, looking for something better. “Here is the place; here the Way unfolds”, Master Dogen wrote.

Summer asks that we not confuse enlightenment with distraction. Where there is a dream of intractable pain, Buddhas show up to be a salve to that suffering. They show up for you. They are not other than you. “Just as cages and snares are limitless, emancipation from them is limitless” Dogen also wrote.

Bonnie Myotai Trace, A Year of Zen