Now all you can do is wait.
It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything.
Like the ebb and flow of tides.
No one can do anything to change them.
When it is time to wait, you must wait
Haruki Murakumi, Japanese writer 1949 – , The Wind up Bird Chronicle
Meditation is the discovery
that the point of life is always arrived at
in the immediate moment.
Alan Watts
with thanks again to Ellen for the beautiful autumn photo
Mindfulness is an act of hospitality.
A way of learning to treat ourselves with kindness and care that slowly begins to percolate into the deepest recesses of our being while gradually offering us the possibility of relating to others in the same manner. Working with whatever is present is enough. There is no need to condemn ourselves for not feeling loving or kind. Rather, the process simply asks us to entertain the possibility of offering hospitality to ourselves no matter what we are feeling or thinking.
This week try taking some time to explore the possibility of sitting with yourself as if you were your own best friend.
Saki Santorelli, Befriending Self
photo Carriec
The way that can be spoken is not the eternal way
That which can be named is not the eternal name
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 1
“Talking about a path is not walking that path.
Thinking about life is not living“.
Directly experiencing life is not something we do easily. By the time we are adults, our experience is mediated through a multitude of conceptual filters that provide a constant commentary about our life, but that ignore the thing itself. This process is so deeply conditioned in most of us that we don’t even notice it. We wander through day after day with our minds spinning an endless stream of thoughts, judgments, hopes, fantasies, critiques, and plans, all mixed with a babble of advertising jingles and fragments of television shows. Lao-tzu suggests that this habitual commentary on life, though a natural part of being human, is not the same thing as a fully lived life. At the same time, he does not totally discount the conceptual thinking process. We make a certain kind of sense out of our life through the use of categories, thoughts, and words. But, he suggests … these thoughts and words are gateways to life, not life itself.
Commentary on the Tao Te Ching by William Martin in A Path and A Practice
photo: without you
How often do our thoughts condition reactions in the mind, as if the thought itself had substance? Yet the thought of a friend is not the friend; it is a thought. How many life scenarios have we created, directed and starred in and, for those moments, taken to be the experience itself? We also may get carried away by the intense energy of our emotions, swept up in a typhoon of the mind and body. To be lost in emotions is not to be mindful of their energy; and when there is a strong identified involvement with them, there is no space in the mind for seeing clearly what is happening.
Joseph Goldstein, in Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
photo autumn wind by jojo
Two extracts from John O’Donohue for this Saturday in Autumn, when we reflect on the fact that life moves on, and yet we can relate to it fully in any particular moment:
We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark and become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty
John O’ Donohue, Beauty
May anxiety never linger about you. May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul. Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul. May you experience each day as a sacred gift, woven around the heart of wonder.
From For Presence (with thanks to Kathy Lewis for reminding me of these words)
