Dropping our efforts

File:Baby.jpg

Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don’t have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don’t you experience it? Because you’ve got to drop something. You’ve got to drop illusions. You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!

Anthony de Mello sj

Not wasting moments

File:Cleveland Way Signpost. - geograph.org.uk - 1036366.jpg

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

photo: martin dawes

Letting things unfold

File:Let go 1 (2327026740).jpg

Leave everything as it is, in fundamental simplicity,

and clarity will arise by itself.

Only by doing nothing

will you do all there is to be done.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

phot randi hausken

 

Looking within

File:Phoenix young couple looking at artwork at Phoenix Art museum.JPG

I can give you nothing
that has not already
its origins within yourself

I can throw open no
picture gallery
but your own

I can help make
your own world visible –
that is all.

Herman Hesse.

photo tomwsulcer

Sunday Quote: Searching

File:New Check-In Aerea.JPG

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,

we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

photo mailander00

Keeping the self fluid

File:Bend in the path to Ben Nevis - geograph.org.uk - 856447.jpg

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be. And know as well the need to not be:
let that ground of all that changes
bring you to completion now.

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

photo stephen sweeney