We miss so much when we rush through the day focused on what we “need” to get done.
Everywhere around me the birds are waiting for the light.
In this world of dreams don’t let the clock cut up your life in pieces.
Jim Harrison
The wonder of this day
Sunday Quote: In front of you
What saves a person is to take a step.
Then another step.
C.S. Lewis
Embrace
It is my feeling that the only thing you have to fear is fear, in that sense that to the extent that you have enough faith or trust to let it happen, you always go through the next one and the next one and the next one. In Tibetan literature they say, ‘Embrace your ten thousand horrible demons and your ten thousand beautiful demons’. You’ve just got to take it all and keep going. All your fears have to be embraced, entertained, honored, and you go on with them.
Ram Dass
Our holy places
One positive aspect of the lockdown, and what is allowed, is the extra time spent walking in nature. (I am not sure that his interpretation is, strictly speaking, etymologically correct, but it predates him by some centuries and is a nice idea)
Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently.
John Muir, 1838 – 1914
Let go and Rest
There is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied… But I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble…The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West… The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness.
Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
liberating
Remember that we are learning to pay attention without self-judgment or discursive analysis. You might say that we are “rolling out the red carpet,” welcoming — beyond liking or disliking — whatever enters the field of the heart. Offering ourselves such close and caring attention is itself liberating.
Saki Santorelli, Heal Thy Self
