What if we are so busy searching for worth
that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird.
Mackenzie Connellee, Suggestion, in Naomi Shihab Nye (ed.,) Time You Let Me In
The enigma of life
Ici la vie continue égale et monotone en surface, pleine d’éclairs, de sommets et de désepérance, dans les profondeurs. Nous sommes arrivés maintenant á un stade de vie si riche en apprehensions nouvelles intransmissibles aux autres âges de la vie – on se sent rempli á la fois de tant de douceur et de tant de désespoir – l’énigme de cette vie grandit, grandit, vous submerge et vous écrase, puis tout á coup en une lueur suprême on prend conscience due “sacré.”
Here life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage – one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair – the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the sacred.
Letter written from Eugénie to May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Dropping the storyline
What does it look like to drop the story line of “me”? There was a baseball movie out recently in which a star pitcher is facing a star batter at a crucial point in the game. The pitcher is having a hard time focusing. He’s thinking about what would happen if the batter got a hit. He’s distracted by the fifty thousand fans shouting and waving. Then he says to himself, “Clear the mechanism.” All of a sudden the sound level in the movie drops into silence. Even though the fans are still moving and waving, you no longer hear them, reflecting what the pitcher is experiencing as he disengages from his own emotional noise. Then he says to himself, “Now just throw the ball to the catcher, like you’ve done a million times before.” In “clearing the mechanism” he was turning away from his preoccupation with the mental noise of “me,” from his fear-based thoughts about imagined results, about himself as a star, as someone special. Then he could enter the direct experience of simply throwing the ball.
Ezra Bayda, How to Live a Genuine Life
Practicing eternity
Seeing into darkness is clarity.
Knowing how to yield is strength.
Use your own light
and return to the source of light.
This is called practicing eternity.
Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching 52
The extra tension in the mind
Suffering can be differentiated from pain. There is pain in life, without doubt, but suffering is the extra tension in the mind that is unable to accommodate change and accept the truth of its experience.
The first two noble truths are that life is difficult and that suffering is the tension in the mind that insists an experience be different from the way it is.
It’s the imperative in the mind that this moment be different that causes our suffering
Sylvia Boorstein, Greet this moment as a Friend
Forget definition
The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself — forget definition, forget assumption, watch.
We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.
No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous.
Marilynne Robinson, 1943 – , American novelist and essayist, Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred
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