To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be.
The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form.
Both are illusions.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
It’s pointless to try to find peace through nullifying or erasing the sense world.
Peace only comes through not giving that world more substantiality or more reality than it actually possesses.
Ajahn Amaro
More on butterflies and lightness in dealing with the daily events, or more precisely, the thoughts they give rise to :
For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished into the world.
Mary Oliver, One or Two Things
photo andre engels
I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
photo Barney Moss
Today is Gaudete Sunday, (“Rejoicing Sunday”). As in the rest of life, Advent maintains a balance between waiting and already present. Waiting can contain the element of incompleteness, of which we are reminded every day. But we also need to hold in mind the “already present” – our own natural goodness and the joy that is available to us at every moment:
There is not one little blade of grass,
there is no colour in this world,
that is not intended to make men rejoice.
John Calvin
Some days or weeks we work with limited vision. The true meaning is hidden. We rely on inner values and on the commitment we have made.
Bringing in a full harvest from human effort has always been difficult, because what is worth bringing in is almost always hidden from us: think of the hard, protected kernel of the wheat amidst a waving sea of gold, or the the walnut nestled in its dense, unyielding skin of green and white, think of how common a much-wanted, simple understanding is needed, hidden by our complex thoughts; or the attempt to fully forgive when even forgiving a little seems to be the last thing we want to do; and lastly, the wish to love and to be loved, when loving is what we are most afraid to do.
David Whyte, Letters from the House
