Walk around feeling like a leaf
know you could tumble at any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.
Naomi Shibab Nye, The Art of Disappearing
Category: Make the most of life
Time unfolding
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
William Stafford
On using our time responsibly
Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time left to confront the real issues. If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so-called “responsibilities” accumulate to fill them up. One master compares them to “housekeeping in a dream.” We tell ourselves we want to spend time on the important things of life, but there never is any time. Helpless, we watch our days fill up with telephone calls and petty projects, with so many responsibilities – or should we call them “irresponsibility’s”?
Sogyal Rinpoche
Accepting whatever comes next….
Now are the rough things smooth, and the smooth things stand in flickering slats, facing the slow tarnish of sun-fall.
Summer is over, or nearly.
And therefore the green is not green anymore but yellow, beige, russet, rust; all the darknesses are beginning to settle in.
And therefore why pray to permanence, why not pray to impermanence, to change, to – whatever comes next.
Willingness is next to godliness.
Mary Oliver, prose-poem
Pieces of a puzzle
It is so tempting to want the answers before we begin the journey. We like to know the way. We like to have maps. 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 being 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 inner fortitude by asking others to map our way. At the end of all this stalling, though, we each have to venture out and simply see what happens.
The instructions are in the living, and I confess that of all the times that I thought I liked this or didn’t care for that, not one was of my choosing or yours. For as the Earth was begun like a dish breaking, eternity is that scene slowly reversing,and you and I, and the things we’re drawn to, are merely the pieces of God unbreaking back together.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Widening our love of life
We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly.
In that sense, readying ourselves for death
is really an ever-widening entry into life.
Ron Rolheiser.
Mindfulbalance 