All that’s visible springs from causes deep inside you
While walking, sitting, lying down
The body itself is the complete truth
Dogen
Roots
Month: September 2024
patience without forcing
The giant pine tree
grows from a tiny sprout.
The journey of a thousand miles
starts from beneath your feet.
Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
Forcing a project to completion,
you ruin what was almost ripe.
Therefore the Master takes action
by letting things take their course.
Tao Te Ching, 64
Facing the Truth
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
Eugene Gendlin, Focusing, quoted in the new book by the excellent Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals
Sunday Quote: the winds of life
Monks, eight worldly winds spin after the world, and the world spins after these eight winds: Gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. These are the eight worldly conditions that spin after the world, and the world spins after these eight worldly conditions.
The Buddha, Lokavipatti Sutta
A falling leaf does not hate the wind
Lin Yutang, 1895 – 1976, Chinese philosopher, linguist, novelist, and translator.
to enjoy one’s life
The meaning of life is just to be alive.
It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.
And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
Alan Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture
Hurrying
Things haven’t changed much in 2,000 years.
Everyone hurries their life on
and suffers from a yearning for the future and a weariness of the present.
But the one who bestows all of their time on their own needs,
who plans out every day as if it were their last,
neither longs for, nor fears, the next day.
Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae [On the Shortness of Life] AD 49
Mindfulbalance 