Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.
Pema Chodron
Peace
Month: January 2024
Step back
Whenever we step away from emotional reactivity, a confining narrative or our filtering concepts, and relate directly to what is present in the here and now, we are taking the backward step.
Give up a practice based on intellectual understanding – searching for phrases and chasing after words.
Take the backward step and turn the light inward.
Your body-mind of itself will drop away, and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.
Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Fukanzazengi
As we are
When Zen Master Joshu was a young monk he asked his teacher Nansen, “What is the Way?” His teacher replied “Your Ordinary Mind is the Way”. By “ordinary” Nansen meant the mind Joshu already had; he didn’t need to turn it, or himself, into something else. He didn’t need to put, as the Zen saying goes, another head on top of the one he already had.
Unfortunately, these days, when we hear the word ordinary, we are inclined to think it means “average or typical” or even “mediocre”. We contrast ordinary with special, and decide, given the choice, we rather be special. But our practice wont make us special; it will keep bringing us back to who we already are.
Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness
Sunday Quote: Veiled
Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.
Haruki Murakami
Returning
After the cold and the storms, bright Spring-like days in Ireland for the weekend.
And if you missed a day, there was always the next,
and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit.
Louise Gluck, Sunrise [extract]
Our journey
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.
Wendell Berry.
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