The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit.
The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Untroubled
Sunday quote: Wind
The plants and flowers
I raised about my hut
I now surrender
To the will
Of the wind
Ryokan 1758 – 1831, Zen Buddhist poet
Give yourself to the air
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
Rilke, You who let yourselves feel
Becoming
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.
Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.
This is a kind of death.
Anais Nin
Meet it and live it
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is.…The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Autumn Clouds
This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds,
Watching the birth and death of beings is like looking at movements of a dance,
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.
The Buddha, Lalitavistara Sutra, 13.79
