Lifelong search

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for  its outlines all our lives.   Some  find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town,  parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert.  There are those  born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense  and busy loneliness of the city.  For some, the search is for the  imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a  lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.  We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the  agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

Josephine Hart, Damage

Really see

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Picasso

Listen

The sounds of streams
are Buddha’s speech.
The coloured mountains
are Buddha’s pure body.

Night brings eighty-four thousand poems of Buddha.

Listen, someday you may awaken.

Su Shi, 1037 – 1101, Chinese calligrapher, essayist and poet.

Sunday Quote: Ceasing the struggle

Spiritual practice is not about accomplishing anything — not about winning or losing — but about ceasing to struggle and relaxing as it is.

Pema Chodron

A constant journey

Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving.

Life is the train, not the station.

Paulo Coelho

Grounded

While sitting on the floor of a room in Japan and looking out on a small garden with flowers blooming and dragon flies hovering in space, I sensed that this small world, almost underfoot, shall I say, had a validity all its own, but must be realized and appreciated from its own level in space.

I suddenly felt I had too long been exclusively above my boots.

Mark George Tobey, 1890 – 1976, American painted, strongly influenced by Asian calligraphy.