Now is the only time.
How we relate to it creates the future.
In other words, if we’re going to be more cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.
Pema Chodron, When things fall apart
Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.
I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.
Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.
Mary Oliver, Thirst
When a cat falls out of a tree, it let’s go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground. But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree, and suddenly make up its mind that it didnt want to fall, it would become tense and rigid, and would be just a bag of broken bones upon landing.
It is the philosophy of the Tao that…the moment we were born we were kicked off a precipice and we are falling, and there is nothing that can stop it.
So instead of living in a state of chronic tension and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat.
Alan Watts, What is Tao?
Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe
— a moment that never was before and never will be again.
Pablo Casals quoted in Diane Loomans, Full Esteem Ahead
The mind is constantly trying to figure out
what page it’s on in the story of itself.
Close the book. Burn the bookmark. End of story.
Now the dancing begins.
Ikko Narasaki Roshi, Zen Buddhist monk, died 1996.
If we forgive life for not being what we told it to be, or expected, or wished, or longed for it to be,
we forgive ourselves for not being what we might have been also.
And then we can be what we are, which is boundless
John Tarrant
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