Not what you are, but what you do is the self.
The self appears in your deeds,
and deeds always mean relationships.
Jung, Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
photo tsayrate
Category: Make the most of life
Just being
Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness
and simply be happy.
(De temps à autre, il est bon de faire une pause dans notre quête du bonheur
et d’être simplement heureux)
Guillaume Apollinaire
photo jim pennucci
Lessons from nature: Moments of rest
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
William Carlos Williams, Winter Trees
Learning
Suffering is our best teacher because it hangs onto us and keeps us in its grip until we have learned that particular lesson. Only then does suffering let go. If we haven’t learned our lesson, we can be quite sure that the same lesson is going to come again, because life is nothing but an adult education class. If we don’t pass in any of the subjects, we just have to sit the examination again. Whatever lesson we have missed, we will get it again. That is why we find ourselves reacting to similar situations in similar ways many times.
Ayya Khema, Being Nothing, Going Nowhere
photo nigel callaghan
Moments to celebrate in life
Children, old people, vagabonds laugh easily and heartily:
they have nothing to lose and hope for little.
In renunciation lies a delicious taste of simplicity and deep peace.
Matthieu Ricard
photo kyle flood
Through the mist
It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances just as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. What is real can never be fully taken away; its essence always remains. It might set us a little freer to believe that there is no path in life – in the low valley… or abroad in the mountain night – that does not lead to some form of heartbreak when the outer narrative disappears and then reappears in a different form. If we are sincere, every … relationship will break our hearts in order to enlarge our understanding of our self and that strange other with whom we have promised ourselves to the future. We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming; as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.
David Whyte, The Poetic Narrative Of Our Times
photo lis burke
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