Category: Be fully present

Solid and loose

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Things arise and pass away. Our natural tendency is to make them solid, to get stuck in our perception, the form, to come to definite conclusions about what is happening. However,  all the images and inferences we have in our mind can be very deceptive. Sometimes. we need to hold things lightly, to wait until what is happening reveals itself, rather than getting caught up in the sign before us.

Whenever something can be distinguished by signs

there is deception

The Diamond Sutra, discourse of the Buddha to the monk Subhuti

Always close to this

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When we are willing to be intimate with what actually is here now, to look directly at all of our experience, we might recognize that this is our life, however different from our thoughts and ideas about it. It is as if we hunker down and actually get very real, recognizing that our thoughts of gaining and losing, good and bad, happy and sad, are what distance us from ourselves.

Once Dongshan was asked, ‘What is the deepest truth? What is the wisdom that liberates?’

His response was, ‘I am always close to this.’

It is the closeness itself – the intimacy with what is here with us now – that is the truth that liberates us.

Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Most Intimate: A Zen Approach to Life’s Challenges

Observe

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The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation

but your thoughts about it

Eckhart Tolle

Sunday Quote: How to measure success in life

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If the day and the night are such,  that you greet them with joy,

and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs,

is more elastic, more starry, more immortal…

that is your success.

Henry David  Thoreau

Free medicine

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Finally Spring has arrived after the warm sunshine of last weekend. Fresh growth everywhere.

Lord, the air smells good today, 

straight from the mysteries  within the inner courts of God. 

A grace like new clothes thrown  across the garden,

free medicine for everybody.

 The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise,  the first blue violets kneeling.

Whatever came from Being is caught up in being, drunkenly forgetting the way back.

Rumi, Lord, the Air Smells Good Today

Everything is a part of everything else

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This morning

the beautiful white heron

was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this

the one world

we all belong to

where everything

sooner or later

is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel

for a little while

quite beautiful myself.

Mary Oliver