A vale of soul-making

Our path will always be strewn with broken branches and stones, yet even the obstacles in our path are part of the path. They make it real. We are not angels and the hard edges of the physical world offer a resistance that, if they do not break us first, can temper the soul and open it to another world, which is nowhere if not here .

This life is a “vale of Soul-making” Keats says. When we see it that way, being lost is not only part of the journey; it is the royal way of becoming real, meaning that our outer knowing can be an accurate reflection of our inner knowing.

Roger Housden, Ten poems for Difficult Times

Valuing simplicity

This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness
Having glimpsed the state of perfect peace,
Let them be able and honest,
Upright and gentle in speech, humble and not proud

Contented and easy to satisfy,
Not burdened in their duties, and simple in living.
Peaceful and calm, wise and skilful,
not proud or demanding in nature.

The Metta Sutta

Every moment

Treat every moment as your last.

It is not preparation for something else.

Shunryu Suzuki roshi, 1904 – 1971

Resources

You understand so little of what is around you

because you do not use what is within you

Hildegard of Bingen, 1098 – 1179, German Benedictine abbess and polymath, writer, composer, philosopher and medical practitioner 

Everywhere

Layman Pang’s daughter said:

“The hundred grass tips:

The teachings of the ancestors

Are shining from them”

Wherever you look, whatever you see, think, feel…the teachings are shining from them

This is the invitation to come back into our life

Henry Shukman, Zen teacher, Mountain Cloud Zen Center

Sunday Quote: Change

Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind

In the primal sympathy which, having been, must ever be.

William Wordsworth, Splendour in the Grass