The art of life is a constant adjustment to our surroundings
Okakura Kakuzo, 1862 – 1913, Japanese scholar and writer
photo Evelyn Simak
Category: Be fully present
Other faces
Now I become myself.
It’s taken Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there, Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning? Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here, Feel my own weight and density!…
My work, my love, my time, my face gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant…
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran, Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
May Sarton, Now I become Myself
This day, stay in the present
Staying solidly rooted in the here and now, and in the body, like a mountain, and not in the storylines in our heads about our life and about others:
When you look at experience directly, it’s obvious that all we are or have is happening right now. Our memories happen now, and the results of what we’ve been involved with happen now. Our project scenarios for the future happen now and our actions – whose consequences may happen in the future – happen now. Furthermore, our awareness of this state of affairs, feelings about and responses to all that – happen now.
And yet there is a current in the mind that creates a felt identity who was, is and will be. Rolling on its surface are worries and expectations about what I will be, regret about what I was. An idea may form: “Having been this, surely I deserve to become that”; or its negative form ” I’ve never been this, so I’ll never become one of those”. There’s a lot of drama and suffering and stress in this flood….
Since I only have pictures of what I was, and stories of what I might or will be, can I be clear as to who I am now?
When we give full attention to the present – in the focus that should surely give us the clearest, most stable impression of who we are – we find that the images break up, like reflections in a stream poked with a finger. And as those images break up, all the weight, the need, the anxiety, suddenly sinks with no footing.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami: Ways to Cross Life’s Floods
photo chi king
Saying yes
I rarely let the word “no” escape
from my mouth
because it is plain to my soul
that God has shouted “Yes, Yes, Yes!”
to every luminous moment of existence.
Hafiz
Courage: A wider perspective
May you receive great encouragement
when new frontiers beckon.
May you take time to celebrate
the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
May you experience each day
as a sacred gift
woven around the heart of wonder.
John O’Donoghue, Benedictus
photo slieve bloom mountains by mooro1
Moments
There is no such thing as a charmed life, not for any of us, no matter where we live or how mindfully we attend to the tasks at hand. But there are charmed moments, all the time, in every life and in every day, if we are only awake enough to experience them when they come and wise enough to appreciate them.
Katrina Kenison, The Gift of an Ordinary Day
