It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.
Ram Dass
Category: Be fully present
Sunday Quote: Beautiful
In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.
Blaise Pascal
A motto for September
More from Chuang Tzu, just to start the month in a Taoist frame of mind:
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free.
Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.
This is the ultimate.
That’s the key
The teachings about recognizing egolessness sound quite abstract, but the path quality of that, the magic instruction that we have all received, the golden key is that part of the meditation technique where you recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, “Thinking.” Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather – the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know that.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape
We just don’t know
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions?
For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Why I am happy
Make yourself a refuge…
There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by, and a willow listens
gracefully.
I hear all this, every summer…
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.
And I know where it is.
William Stafford, Why I am Happy
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