Some people want it pure white
but sweep as you may,
you can’t empty the mind
Keizan Jokin, 1268 – 1325, second founder of Soto Zen
photo gloumouth1
Category: Be fully present
Just this moment
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now...
Mary Oliver, One or Two things
photo david shankbone
Just the way it is
Something we need to hold in mind at all times...
If you are invested in security and certainty
you are on the wrong planet
Pema Chodron
Leaning too far forward
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
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
