For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance.
We ride the wave and are
the wave.
And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.
William Stafford
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
Thoreau
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.
That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its inner most chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream.
Rilke, Letters to a Yong Poet
Many of the great Zen and Taoist teachers emphasized the ordinary and the dangers of spiritual importance:
Emperor Wu: ‘I have built many temples, copied innumerable Sutras and ordained many monks since becoming Emperor. Therefore, I ask you, what is my merit?’
Bodhidharma: ‘None whatsoever!’
Emperor Wu: ‘Why no merit?’
Bodhidharma: ‘Doing things for merit has an impure motive and will only bear the puny fruit of rebirth.’
Emperor Wu, a little put out: ‘Well, what then is the most important principle of Buddhism?’
Bodhidharma: ‘Vast emptiness. Nothing sacred.’
Emperor Wu, by now bewildered, and not a little indignant: ‘Who is this that stands before me?’
Bodhidharma: ‘I do not know.’
If we can allow ourselves to live an ordinary life while also staying awake to the great void at the center of all that is, then we can be this intermediary place between that intoxicating, mystical bliss of oblivion and the wonder of how the Divine creates and reveals Itself in all the forms of life. Our lives are the expression of this bridge – ordinary and extraordinary, all things in their place, everything free to be as it is, and our consciousness, our heart, free to be used as needed.
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary
This world is like a mountain. Your echo depends on you. If you scream good things, the world will give it back. If you scream bad things, the world will give it back. Even if someone says badly about you, speak well about him.
Change your heart to change the world
Shams-i Tabrīzī, 1185 – 1248 Shams-i Tabrīzī, Persian Shafi’ite poet, credited as the spiritual instructor of Rumi
The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes
because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it
Simone Weil, 1909 -1943, French Philosopher
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