Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others.
Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
we have opened you.
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired.
Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.
Rumi
We may in the past have had marvellous spiritual experiences – almost everyone in this world is lucky enough to experience satori once in their life . . . Ever afterwards, you search for that experience again: ‘I want it that way.’ You once had a wonderful girlfriend, and now you want another just like her. That way of thinking blocks the possibility of meeting with life. This is why meditation…. means affirming that your everyday mind is the way – not the mind you ought to have or the mind you might have if you practiced acceptance or concentration. We want you to look at it just the way it is right now – that’s Buddha. Just like that.
Alan Watts, Zen: The Supreme Experience
All the colours of the mountain peaks,
all the echoes of the valleys
are the form and the voice of the Buddha
Dogen
Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.
And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.
* * *
Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you
for everything.
Mary Oliver, A Settlement
If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then since the world is in fact planted with pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.
It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
Annie Dilliard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
If I was asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to men of our century, I should simply say: In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you
Tolstoy, Essays, letters and Miscellanies
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