Something is always far away.

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it,  rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire……. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Beyond

For to know nothing is nothing,

not to want to know anything likewise,

but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything,

that is when peace enters in.

Samuel Beckett, Molloy

The unknown is an answer

It was in the process of asking that I came upon a truth:

that the unknown is an answer.

That there are answers upon answers,

and sometimes no questions at all.

Mary Oliver, Breakage

Winds may blow

Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes  Oh, “this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking”. As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space – which is the mind’s natural clarity – begins to expand and settle.

Yongey Mingpur Rinpoche

Sunday Quote: Trust the process

La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.

The path provides the natural next step.

Spanish palindrome – reading the same backwards as forwards.  It is on the subject of pilgrimage or life’s journey , which, as we walk, returns us to our origins

Grounded

Some of these old teachings are very beautiful. The fundamental insight is that we are always whole and alive, even right in the midst of difficulties. We thus loosen our identification with our story as something solid, as a permanent sense of agitation, weakness or illness.

A monk asked, “How can a person escape from birth, old age, sickness and death?”

Lingyun replied, “The green mountain is fundamentally unmoving,

But the floating clouds pass back and forth”

(Little is known of Lingyun Zhiqin, a disciple of Chinese Zen Master Guishan Lingyou (771 – 853). “Birth, old age, sickness and death” are shorthand for all the difficulties of life and its overall unsatisfactory nature).