Month: February 2023

An anxious reach

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The start of the season of Lent in the Christian tradition. The word Lent comes perhaps from the Old English and refers to the lengthening of the days in Spring. Most spiritual and wisdom traditions around the world have periods when we are encouraged to simplify things down to better see what is important or to dedicate more time to reflection and silence.

The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible. The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere in the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties, something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows.…

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulse, is something we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people and ideas.

We require periods of fast in the life of our minds no less than in that of our bodies.

Alian de Botton, School of life: Distraction-concentration

The still centre

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Life is completely still.

It is without excitement.

It is always still, indifferent to whether or not your life is dramatic

Joko Dave Haselwood, 1931 – 2014, Zen teacher

for Eimear and Brenton, who recently welcomed beautiful little Oscar into the world

Trust in your experience

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This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folk are the same from the start.
Inquiring about a difference
is like asking to borrow string when you already have a good strong rope.

Every Dharma is known in the heart.

After rain, the mountain colors intensify.
Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

from the great Hsu Yun, 1840 – 1959, renowned Chan (Zen) Buddhist, regarded as the greatest Buddhist teacher in China in the modern era.

found in Grainger, The Longing In Between: Sacred Poetry From Around The World

Sunday Quote: Stay Here, now

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Too much longing:

it separates us

like scent from bread,

rust from iron.

Jane Hirshfield, Sentencings [extract]

Seize the present

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The well-known Carpe Diem text. The original Latin is meaning is closer to “harvest the day” which gives perhaps a deeper sense than the popular translation:

Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms.

Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:


Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk.

Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.

Horace, 65 – 8 BC, Roman Lyric Poet, Ode I. 11 translation Burton Raffel, The Essential Horace: Odes, Epodes, Satires and Epistles, 

Enlargement

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When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness.

I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?

Oliver Burkeman from his Guardian column