All the colours of the mountain peaks,
all the echoes of the valleys
are the form and the voice of the Buddha
Dogen
Sunday Quote: Teachings all round
Month: June 2022
Turn the pages
Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.
And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.
* * *
Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you
for everything.
Mary Oliver, A Settlement
Planted with riches
If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then since the world is in fact planted with pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.
It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
Annie Dilliard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Stop a moment
If I was asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to men of our century, I should simply say: In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you
Tolstoy, Essays, letters and Miscellanies
The way you travel
Close is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done…close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.
Our human essence lies not in arrival but in being almost there: we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending unanticipated arrivals.
Human beings do not find their essence through fulfilment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go.
David Whyte, “Close” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
New and wholesome
Each time we go out, the world is open and free; it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome from it each day. It is a travesty of possibility and freedom to think we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street, the one right way is all that is allotted to us. Certainty is a subtle destroyer…
John O Donohue, Eternal Echoes
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