The path

File:Coast path at Higher Sharpnose Point - geograph.org.uk - 1570182.jpg

We can learn to recognize that the difficulty is our path instead of trying to escape from it. This is a radical yet necessary change in our perspective. When uncomfortable things happen to us, we rarely want to have anything to do with them. We might respond with the belief ‘Things shouldn’t be this way’ or ‘Life shouldn’t be so messy.’ Who says? Who says that life shouldn’t be a mess? When life is not fitting our expectations of how it’s supposed to be, we usually try to change it to fit our expectations. But the key to practice is not to try to change our life but to change our relationship to our expectations — to learn to see whatever is happening as our path.

Ezra Bayda, Being Zen

photo philip halling

Right now

File:Waiting for a train.jpg

A similar theme on staying in the present moment, this time from the early Christian tradition

One of the early Desert Fathers said

 ‘There is no such thing as delay with the Holy Spirit.’

This means that everything happens at the right moment.

Laurence Freeman, Common Ground: Letters to a World Community of Meditators

photo: inexplicable

Moments are all we have

forest light 2

Small moments or days are enough to see the richness of life, if we are able to pay attention and give ourselves fully:

What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
that’s all. What did you expect? Sophistication?
They’re small creatures and they are
filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not
moan in happiness? The little
worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing.

Mary Oliver, Hum

As they are

reeds

To trust in things being as they are is the secret of life.

But we don’t want to hear that.

I can absolutely trust that in the next year, my life is going to be changed, different…

but always just the way it is.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Sunday Quote: Able to hold both

File:Fogseasonwayanad.jpg
There is no paradise,
no place of true completion
that does not include within its walls
the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield

Trust yourself

File:울프독14.JPG

Have good trust in yourself,

not in the one that you think you should be

but in the one that you are

Taizan Maezumi, 1931— 1995, Japanese zen Buddhist teacher

photo venpia