Category: Be fully present

Where are you going?

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We frequently get caught up in work, and identify with the pressing demands there, which pull us along and create a sense of great importance.

There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man standing alongside the road, shouts, “Where are you going?” and the first man replies, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don’t know where we are going, and we can’t stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war within ourselves…We have to learn the art of stopping – stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. 

 Thích Nhât Hanh, The Heart of the Buddhas Teaching

Like a mirror

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The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror;

it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing;

it receives, but does not keep.

Chuang-tzu, 4th Century BC

One hour at a time

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Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

Mary Oliver, Snow Geese

One world at a time

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Satisfaction is very close and simple: the strange happiness of completely joining with whatever we are doing in that moment… When the writer Thoreau was on his deathbed, a visitor asked him – “from where you lie, so close to the brink of the dark river, can you say how the opposite shore looks to you?”

It is said that he replied gently, “One world at a time”

Susan Murphy, Upside Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the ordinary

Sunday Quote: Recharging batteries

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Stress is caused by the mind’s response to events and suffering by the stories we tell ourselves about our lives:

Not being able to govern events,

I govern myself. 

(Ne pouvant régler les événements, je me règle moi-même)

Michel de Montaigne ( 1533 – 1592),  Essais, Book II

Behind the fear and sadness

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Another Autumn Saturday, another poem.

A second storm is hitting Ireland today – clouds obscure the sun, but the sun is still there.

This world –
absolutely pure
As is.
Behind the fear,
Vulnerability.
Behind that,
Sadness,
then compassion
And behind that the vast sky.

 Rick Fields, 1942–1999,  American journalist, poet, editor-at-large of Tricycle: A Buddhist Review.

Died at 59 of cancer. He wrote a series of poems on his illness from a Buddhist perspective.