Birdsong brings relief
to my longing
I’m just as ecstatic as they are,
but with nothing to say!
Please universal soul, practice
some song or something through me!
Rumi
Sing a joyful song
Month: June 2022
The first gift
Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing. To believe in blessing is to believe that our being here, our very presence in the world, is itself the first gift, the primal blessing. As Rilke says: Heir zu sein ist so viel – “to be here is immense”.
John O Donohue, Benedictus, To Bless the Space Between Us
Really taste life
Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry.
Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
Ernest Hemingway
Always reaching
I long for a small respite from the reaching, a moment of sweet stillness, quiet darkness, the great silence that can penetrate and loosen the small, hard knots of endless trying. I want to be willing and able to move only as fast as I am capable of moving while still remaining connected to the impulse to move from deep within, stopping when I have lost that slender thread of desire and having the courage and faith to wait, in stillness, until I find it again.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
Your own myth
Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others.
Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
we have opened you.
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired.
Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.
Rumi
Meeting with life
We may in the past have had marvellous spiritual experiences – almost everyone in this world is lucky enough to experience satori once in their life . . . Ever afterwards, you search for that experience again: ‘I want it that way.’ You once had a wonderful girlfriend, and now you want another just like her. That way of thinking blocks the possibility of meeting with life. This is why meditation…. means affirming that your everyday mind is the way – not the mind you ought to have or the mind you might have if you practiced acceptance or concentration. We want you to look at it just the way it is right now – that’s Buddha. Just like that.
Alan Watts, Zen: The Supreme Experience
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