It’s the rose’s unfolding …… that creates the desire to see –
In every colour and circumstance, may the eyes be open for what comes.
Ghalib, For the raindrop
We grow our own future
The heart is like a garden.
It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love.
What seeds will you plant there?
Buddha
….and endures all kinds of change
If we think of happiness as a way of being, as something that represents a state of flourishing, of fulfillment, of a well-being that endures through all events in life, even all different kinds of emotions and mental states, something that gives you the inner resources to deal with whatever comes your way—pleasant, unpleasant circumstances, helpful circumstances, adverse circumstances—something that gives you some kind of platform or way of being that’s behind all that, and that gives you the resources to deal with all that.
Matthieu Ricard
Happiness is already here…..
An interesting quote. Sometimes we look in all kinds of places for our happiness – a new relationship, a better car, a holiday, other people, a more prestigious job. However most research and practice shows that very little of happiness is due to changes in external circumstances, or getting the world to be as we think it should be. These things change all the time, and even when we think we have gotten the mix right, and feel we are in control, it is often a short-lived illusion. Rather, happiness is a skill, or a group of skills, that we can cultivate, based on a source of natural goodness already within us, with which we approach both good and bad in life as they arise and pass away before us. Looking for happiness creates a duality which is not always helpful. Always focusing outside of ourselves means that we do not often realize what we already have, and fail to live in this moment, as we work to change ourselves and our circumstances to “improve” them and ourselves.
I wish to draw attention to the following problem:
the idea of happiness presupposes that at present we are unhappy.
Kosho Uchiyama Roshi
What we do in meditation
Each separate being
in the universe
returns to (a) common source.
Returning to the source
is serenity.
Lao Tzu
When things feel heavy
When we feel heavy, or are weary, and we want to rise from all that saddens our souls, we can turn to nature these days as it stirs from its winter slumber, and let it nourish and give wings to our imagination:
In spring the blue azures bow down
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the fields.
Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows–
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking–
don’t seem enough to carry me through this
world, and I think: how I would like
to have wings–
blue ones–
ribbons of flame.
How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.
And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London–a boy staring through the window, when God came fluttering up.
Of course, he screamed, seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body
leaning on the sill, and the thousand-faceted eyes.
Well, who knows. Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.
Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up, and turned away from the sooty sill and the
dark city– turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings,
to a life of the imagination.
Mary Oliver, Blue Azures
