Category: Be fully present

Seeing life as a gift

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Birthdays MMB 01.jpg

Every morning I vow to be grateful for the precious gift of my human birth. It’s a big gift, and it includes a lot of stuff I never particularly wanted for my birthday. Some of the things in the package I wish I could exchange for a different size or color. But I want to find out what it means to be a human being — my curiosity remains intense even as I get older — so I say thanks for the whole thing. It’s all of a piece.

In thirteenth-century Japan, Zen Master Dogen wrote, ‘The Way is basically perfect and all-pervading.’  I’m already in it. We are all in it; we are made of it.

Susan Moon

photo mattbuck

Courage

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Croagh patrick path.jpg

The whole process of meditation is one of creating a good ground, a cradle of loving-kindness where we actually are nurtured. What’s being nurtured is our confidence in our own wisdom, our own health, and our own courage, our own goodheartedness. We develop some sense that the way we are — the kind of personality that we have and the way we express life — is good, and that by being who we are completely and by totally accepting that and having respect for ourselves, we are standing on the ground of warriorship.

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape

photo of Croagh Patrick, Co Mayo by Kanchelskis

No Maps

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Ortelius 1592 Ireland Map.jpg

It’s so tempting to want the answers before we begin the journey. We like to know our way.  We like to have maps.  We like to have guides.  But we are more like a breathing puzzle, a living bag of pieces, and each day shows us what a piece or two is for, where it might go, how it might fit.  Over time, a picture starts to emerge by which we begin to understand our place in the world. Unfortunately we waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of vital inner fortitude by asking others to map our way. The instructions are in the living.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Map of Ireland 1592 by Abraham Ortelius

A different day

Karl Duffy8 Comments

dawn jura

If you’re determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience,

know only that you have chosen to do so,

and that the opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living

Finding treasures

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

blackcatgreeneyes

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.

Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

Roahl Dahl

A wider container

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Picture of the Year Winner

Awareness is not the same as thought.

It lies beyond thinking, although it makes no use of thinking, honoring its value and its power.

Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thought as thought rather than getting caught up in them as reality.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever You go, There you are

photo Wagner Machado Carlos Lemes