If you put down the stories you tell yourself about your life for one minute, what remains?
Let go of a hundred years;
Rest from the ten thousand concerns.
Let go with both hands and walk on,
Free from judgment and division
Shitou Xiqian, Chan Master and hermit, 700–790 Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage
Silence is fruitful only when it leads to interior peace and stillness.
Contemplation is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
You do not find it by travelling, but by standing still.
Thomas Merton
We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment, qualities which are a central, and abiding dynamic of its presence,
but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’ is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a full union with the world.
The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the career counsellor’s central surprise, the biographer’s conundrum, an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a continual unstoppable flow, an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart and leave;
a pilgrim suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who is willing to fail, often spectacularly, at their own life rather than succeed drably, at someone else’s
David Whyte
Once, when I was particularly depressed, a friend and pacifist from Holland told me something very beautiful: “The people who worked to build the cathedrals in the Middle Ages never saw them completed. It took two hundred years and more to build them. Some stonecutter somewhere sculpted a beautiful rose; it was his life’s work, and it was all he ever saw. But he never entered into the completed cathedral.
But one day, the cathedral was really there.
You must imagine peace the same way
Dorothee Soelle, Against the Wind
Paying attention required no equipment, no special clothes, no green fees or personal trainers. You do not even have to be in particularly good shape, all you need is a body on this earth, willing to notice where it is, trusting that something as small as a hazelnut can become an altar in this world.
Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World
Our minds are always asking “How can this moment be better?”
What if we tried asking today, “What is already here?” and stop wishing that reality become something else:
A monk asked Yaoshan
What is the essenital truth in all your teaching?
Yaushan replied
Clouds are in the blue sky;
water is in the bottle
Chan master Yaoshan Weiyan , 751–834, found in the Transmission of the Lamp
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