Month: January 2024

Seeking the path

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I think they don’t envy anyone or anything -

not the tiger, not the emperor, not even the philosopher.
Why should they?
The wind is their friend, the least tree is home.

Nor is melody, they have discovered, necessary.
Nor have they delicate palates; without hesitation they will eat
anything you can think of –

corn, mice, old hamburgers –
swallowing with such hollering and gusto
no one can tell whether it’s a brag
or a prayer of deepest thanks. At sunrise, when I walk out,

I see them in trees, or on ledges of buildings,
as cheerful as saints, or thieves of the small job
who have been, one more night, successful –
and like all successes, it turns my thoughts to myself.

Should I have led a more simple life?
Have my ambitions been worthy?
Has the wind, for years, been talking to me as well?
Somewhere, among all my thoughts, there is a narrow path.

Mary Oliver, Crows [extract]

Completely whole

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Intrinsically, we are all completely and perfectly sane. We are enveloped and imbued by this sanity.

But unable to bring ourselves to acknowledge this, we hatch a hodgepodge of beliefs which we embrace and then chase as if they were real, stumbling and falling on the great way. 

Dōgen Zenji, 1200 -1253, Japanese Buddhist priest and founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan.

Balancing the two efforts

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It is gone cold in Ireland – although not as cold as the rest of Europe – and travel companies have intensified their efforts to sell Summer holidays.

We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house and so on.

But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive

Thich Nhat Hanh

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Time for oneself

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Finding yourself doesn’t require that you fly to Tibet, join a convent, or build a meditation room.

Just consistently keep a minimal commitment to empty time. 

Martha Beck

The changing of the year

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When the stories of our life no longer bind us, we discover within them something greater. 

We discover that within the very limitations of form, of our maleness and femaleness, of our parenthood and our childhood, of gravity on the earth and the changing of the seasons, is the freedom and harmony we have sought for so long. 

Our individual life is an expression of the whole mystery, and in it we can rest in the center of the movement, the center of all worlds.

Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart

Having a happy life

Karl Duffy3 Comments

The trick to having a happy life is to remember that it all comes down to what we ourselves make of the life we have. 

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so, Ralph Waldo Emerson says, ” but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger and mosquitoes and silly people.”

Joan Chittister, The Monastic Way, June 2022