We can get so caught up in the “drama” of our life and our work that we fail to be present for what is in front of us. How many autumns do we truly experience?
世事一场大梦，人生几度秋凉
The affairs of the world are but a great dream;
how many times do we feel the coolness of autumn?
Su Shi, 1037 -1101, Chinese Song-dynasty poet
Eternity is not somewhere beyond this life. It is this moment when we stop reaching backward and forward. When thought stops measuring time, the eternal is simply what remains: entirely present, always.
Eternity is not infinity.
It is not a long time.
It does not begin at the end of time.
It does not run parallel to time.
In its entirety it always was.
In its entirety it will always be.
It is entirely present always.
Wendell Berry, From Leavings.
Wendell Berry died on Monday aged 92. He was an activist, a poet and a farmer whose poems, as one writer said, “should be read as part of a spiritual practice and as poems, in some sense, devoted to dwelling, to living thoughtfully in one place“
Just as a flame blown out by the wind
Goes to rest and cannot be defined,
So the wise person, freed from name and form
Goes to rest beyond all reckoning.
The Buddha, Sutta Nipāta 4.6
The Buddha often used the image of a flame going out – not destroyed, but freed from conditions. Likewise, the liberated mind is not annihilated but beyond all definitions.
Ajahn Amaro, The Island
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark.
That’s where the most important things come from,
where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.
Dorothy Parker
It is not in calm weather
that one sees the skill of the pilot,
but in a storm.
Epictetus, Discourses 1.24.6
Mindfulbalance 