Don’t prolong the past,
don’t invite the future,
don’t be deceived by appearances,
just dwell in present awareness.
Patrul Rinpoche
photo ian paterson
Category: Be fully present
Being just in the now and not in time
I was at an event yesterday where a speaker said that a certain tribe in the Amazon have no concept of time, no words for “week” or “month”. Strange, since we allow these ideas exert such pressure on us. They, on the contrary, do not think of time as a “thing”, or understand the idea of “I haven’t got the time”, racing against the clock to get something completed. This allows them to relate differently to the moment; they are not persecuted by an idea of a perfect moment, or relate to it just through the thinking faculty; they are grounded in the now, no matter how it is:
If your relationship to the present moment is not right,
nothing can ever be right in the future,
because when the future comes,
it’s the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle
photo arjan richter
Grounded
The emphasis in working life is to get things done, get results and move things on, which can give each day a driven quality and make moment-to-moment awareness difficult. Grounding ourselves every now and then in the body and attuning simply and calmly to the breath can help us remain balanced, and allows us let go of some of the ways we can get locked into fixed positions:
May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
and with freed senses
feel the earth breathing with us.
John O’Donoghue, “To Learn from Animal Being”
photo Ireen Trummer
Where your life is
What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.
Mary Oliver, from Mornings at Blackwater
photo of the River Barrow at Bagenalstown, Co Carlow, May 18th 2015.
Noticing the ordinary
Never forget that every mind is shaped by the most ordinary experiences.
To say that something is ordinary is to say that it is of the kind that has made the biggest contribution to the formation of your most basic ideas
Paul Valéry, French poet and philosopher, 1871 – 1945
photo jorge royan
Hidden depths
In almost every tradition there are tales of gods appearing in the guise of ordinary visitors. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Abraham looked up and saw three men standing near. He welcomed them, not knowing they were angels. Here Mary Oliver tells of a similar story from Ancient Greece. The key is paying attention, which allows us see the riches in everyday occurrences. In this way some people show “hospitality to angels without knowing it”
In Greece,
a long time ago,
an old couple
opened their door
to two strangers
who were,
it soon appeared,
not men at all,
but gods.
It is my favorite story –
how the old couple
had almost nothing to give
but their willingness
to be attentive –
but for this alone
the gods loved them
and blessed them –
when they rose
out of their mortal bodies,
like a million particles of water
from a fountain,
the light
swept into all the corners
of the cottage,
and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down –
but still they asked for nothing
but the difficult life
which they had already.
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.
from Mary Oliver, Mockingbirds
