All wisdom traditions, religious and secular, speak of the ability to maintain a still place within, no matter how busy we are. The word mindfulness traces its origin to the pali word “to remember”
The true saint goes in and out amongst the people
and eats and sleeps with them
and buys and sells in the market
and marries and takes part in social intercourse,
and never forgets God for a single moment.
Abu Sa’id ibn Abi l-Tkayr, Sufi Poet, 967 – 1049
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
C.S. Lewis, The Fours Loves
People were always getting ready for tomorrow.
I didn’t believe in that.
Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself
… and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.
Donald Winnicott, English paediatrician and psychoanalyst
I have come to see that our problem is that we don’t know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It’s the ability to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.
Mark Epstein, Opening Up to Happiness
In the East the moon is a symbol of Enlightenment, in the West of the Unconscious. Times of difficulty can be times of growth
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
Izumi Shikibu, Japanese poet, 974-1034, one of the thirty-six female immortals of poetry.
