Does not just apply to people but to all experiences
When you do not block people from coming to you, when you do not stop people from leaving, and when your mind transcends both their coming and leaving, your spiritual practice is indeed accomplished.
Kim Jae Woong, Polishing the Diamond, Enlightening the Mind: Reflections of a Korean Buddhist Master
The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.…Ezekiel excoriates false prophets who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery.
Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock – more than a maple – a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
If you must look back, do so forgivingly.
If you will look forward, do so prayerfully.
But the wisest course would be to be present
in the present gratefully.
Maya Angelou
Now is the only time.
How we relate to it creates the future.
In other words, if we’re going to be more cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.
Pema Chodron, When things fall apart
Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.
I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.
Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.
Mary Oliver, Thirst
When a cat falls out of a tree, it let’s go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground. But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree, and suddenly make up its mind that it didnt want to fall, it would become tense and rigid, and would be just a bag of broken bones upon landing.
It is the philosophy of the Tao that…the moment we were born we were kicked off a precipice and we are falling, and there is nothing that can stop it.
So instead of living in a state of chronic tension and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat.
Alan Watts, What is Tao?
Mindfulbalance 