Category: Be fully present

Why a walk in nature helps

Karl Duffy5 Comments

tree light

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner, Lost

Sunday Quote: In the moment

Karl Duffy4 Comments

File:Tour to the Quebrada de las Conchas.jpg

I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke, American poet, 1908 – 1963, The Waking

photo Jlla00

Asking for nothing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Dupont's Lark, Morocco 1 (crop).jpg

God, I said. What good is language?

part of me wondered, but I did not stop.

God I said, from deep inside of me.

Outside it was almost dawn:

the birds awake in all the trees, singing.

These were not the words I had grown up to say:

My mind quiet before the growing sounds.

The birds have opened all their throats once and then again and again:

God, each one singing, asking for nothing, inside my heart.

Nadia Colburn, Where the Light Enters

photo mike prince

Beneath

Karl Duffy3 Comments

lake nyon

Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behaviour.

You are not your thoughts

You are beneath the thinker

You are the stillness beneath the mental noise.

You are the love and joy beneath the pain

Eckhart Tolle

 

Sunday Quote: No need for words

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Monasterio de Batalha. Presbiteiro.jpg

I like the silent church

before the service begins,

better than any preaching.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

photo jose luis filpo cabana

Back to basics

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Rice fields near Doi Inthanon NP.JPG

Just keep breathing in and out like this. Don’t be interested in anything else.  Concentrate your awareness on the breath. Just keep doing it. Don’t take up anything else. There’s no need to think about gaining things. Don’t take up anything at all. Simply know the in-breath and the out-breath. The in-breath and the out-breath. [In] on the in-breath; [out] on the out-breath. Just stay with the breath in this way until you are aware of the in-breath and aware of the out-breath….aware of the in-breath…. aware of the out-breath. Be aware in this way until the mind is peaceful, without irritation, without agitation, merely the breath going out and coming in. Let your mind remain in this state.

Do it as if you won’t gain anything, as if nothing will happen, as if you don’t know who’s doing it, but keep doing it anyway. Like rice in the barn. You take it out and sow it in the fields, as if you were throwing it away, sow it throughout the fields, without being interested in it, and yet it sprouts, rice plants grow up, you transplant it and you’ve got sweet green rice. That’s what it’s about. 

Ajahn Chah

photo supercarwaar