The mind is exactly this tree, that grass….
without thought or feeling both disappear
Ikkyu, 1394 – 1481 , Zen Buddhist monk and poet.
Category: Be fully present
Mirth
Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be.
You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness.
G.K. Chesterton
Remember
One kind word can warm three winter months
Japanese proverb
Sunday Quote: Approach to life
To play a wrong note is insignificant;
to play without passion is inexcusable.
Beethoven
Saturday pause
Many of us have been running all our lives. We have the feeling that we need to run — into the future, away from the past, out from wherever we are. In truth, we don’t need to go anywhere. We just need to sit down and look deeply to discover that the whole cosmos is right here within us.
Thich Nhat Hahn
The source of vitality
Aristotle concluded that bliss is not about perfection. You have to deal with bad fortune sometimes. The difference is whether you approach it with nobility and a great soul. What is a great soul or ‘mega-soul?’ Souls get big from opening out beyond the limitations of human knowledge and control. Everyone is called to be a mystic of some sort, and being open to mystery and myth, the intuitive and the non-rational, to art and ritual, to nature and animals, to absurd ideas and outrageous fantasies gives the soul room to fashion a lovable and thoughtful human being. However simple your life, however ordinary and retiring, you can have a mega-soul, a vast source of vitality, and the capacity for pain and failure as well. You can be noble in your simplicity and deep and wide in your ability to contain life.
Thomas Moore
