Month: August 2024

All life is good

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Knowing that your life is short, to enjoy it day after day, moment after moment, is the life of ‘form is form, and emptiness is emptiness.’ The famous Chinese Zen master Ummon said ‘Sun-faced Buddha and Moon-faced Buddha.’ When he was ill, someone asked him. ‘How are you?’ And he answered, ‘Sun-faced Buddha and moon-faced Buddha.’ That is the life of ‘form is form and emptiness is emptiness.’ One year of life is good. One hundred years of life are good. If you continue our practice, you will attain this stage.

Shunryu Suzuki roshi, Zen mind Beginners Mind

[The Sun-face buddha supposedly lives for a really long time, at least hundreds of years. The Moon-face buddha lives just for one day and one night]

The best teachers

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No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

Thomas Merton

Sunday Quote: Inside

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You say God looks at us from above,

but he actually sees us from the inside

Rumi

Rest

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Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.

Walter Brueggemann, 1933 – American Old Testament scholar 

Apples

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Don’t go all the way to heaven. Reach for apples, not the clouds. Let them fluff through the sky, skimming passage, into the past.

You are your present, your own apple. Pick it from your tree. Raise it in your hand. It’s gleaming, rich with stars. Claim it. Take a luxurious bite out of the present, and whistle along the road of your destiny.

Pablo Neruda

non-opposition

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Do not become annoyed when faced with difficulties.

To do so merely adds difficulty to difficulty and further disturbs your mind.

By maintaining a mind of peace and non-opposition, difficulties will naturally fall away

Sheng Yen, 1931 – 2009, Taiwanese Buddhist monk,