When we use the term “basic goodness”,
we are talking about our inherent completeness.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Category: Be fully present
Red leaves
We cling to our own point of view, as if everything depended on it.
Yet our views have no permanence;
like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.
Chuang Tzu, Chinese Philosopher, 4th century BC
photo foxtod
In the presence of
Joy is the meeting place of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us .. with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.
To allow our selves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well loved familiar face – I was here and you were here and together we made a world.
David Whyte , Consolations : The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Sunday Quote: Jump
Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live
Rumi
photo calyponte
Learning to be calm
Now and again the earth begins to desire rest. And in the weeks of autumn especially it shows its disposition to calm, to what feels like a stasis, a pause. The ocean retains its warmth, while high white cloud-boats ride out of the west. Now the birds of the woods are often quiet, but on the shore, the migrating sanderlings and plovers are many and vocal, rafts of terns with the year’s young among them come with the incoming tides, and plunge into the waves, and rise with silver leaves in their beaks. One can almost see the pulsing of their hearts, vigorous and tiny in the trim of white feathers. Where I live, on the harbor edge of the Cape’s last town, perfect strangers walking along the beach turn and say to each other, without embarrassment or hesitation: isn’t it beautiful.
Mary Oliver, Where I Live
photo mozzercork @ flickr
Preparing to live or living?
We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us.
Thich Nhat Hanh
