Joy in life

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life – just imagine that
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.

Mary Oliver, To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

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To see with the heart

An eye is meant to see things.
The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: To love a genuine love.
Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind
when it only wants to see why.

A lover is always accused of something.
But when they find their love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back completely changed.

Rumi, Night and Sleep

Making waves

Usually we think of our mind as receiving impressions from outside, but that is not a true understanding

The true understanding is that the mind includes everything.

Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble.

You yourself make the waves in your mind

If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm

This mind is called big mind

Shunryu Suzuki roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind 

What changes everything

Everything changes once we identify with being

the witness to the story,

instead of the actor in it,

Ram Dass

I don’t care

The most prophetic thing Thomas Merton ever did was to say to a shopkeeper who asked him what brand of toothpaste he preferred, “I don’t care”. Merton was intrigued by the store clerk’s response. “He almost dropped dead” he wrote,  “I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or something with five colours. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn’t care about the secret ingredient ….the worst thing you can do now is not care about these things”

The ultimate goal of the marketer is to have us see consumer products not as mere things, but as keys to our identity.  Brands are marks that owners put on their property …., and we are in perilous territory when our self-image, and even our self-worth, is founded on which brands and labels we can afford to purchase and display.

Kathleen Norris, The Secret Ingredient

Sunday Quote: Aliveness in life

I learned that every mortal still tastes death

But only some will taste life

Rumi