You will always find an answer
in the sound of water
Chuang Tzu
photo of Coumeenoole beach Dingle, by sharon loxton
Everywhere and everything
Take a pitcher full of water and set it down in the water
– now it has water inside and water outside.
We mustn’t give it a name,
lest silly people start talking again about the body and the soul.
Kabir
Surprising
We never start to be grateful unless we wake up. Wake up to what? To surprise. As long as nothing surprises us, we walk through life in a daze. We need to practice waking up to surprise. I suggest using this simple question as a kind of alarm clock: “Isn’t this surprising?” “Yes, indeed!” will be the correct answer, no matter when and where and under what circumstances you ask this question. After all, isn’t it surprising that there is anything at all, rather than nothing? Ask yourself at least twice a day, “Isn’t this surprising?” and you will soon be more awake to the surprising world in which we live.
David Steindl-Rast, Awake, Aware and Alert
photo tony hisgett
All we can wish for
There is really only one possible prayer:
Give me to do everything that I do in the day
with a sense of the sacredness of life.…
Tomorrow the world crashes in again.
May Sarton, Journal of A Solitude
photo project manhattan
Just like this
If you ask someone who is swimming in water, ‘What is water like?’, then they simply bring attention to it and say, ‘Well, it feels like this. It’s this way.’ Then you ask, ‘How is it exactly? Is it wet or cold or warm or hot…?’ All of these words can describe it. Water can be cold, warm, hot, pleasant, unpleasant… But it’s just like this. The realm we’re swimming in for a lifetime is this way! It feels like this! You feel it! Sometimes it’s pleasant. Sometimes it’s unpleasant. Most of the time it’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant. But always it’s just this way. Things come and go and change, and there’s nothing that you can depend on as being totally stable. [It’s] all energy and change and movement; all flux and flow.
Now we’re not judging it; we’re not saying it’s good or it’s bad, or you should like it, or you shouldn’t; we’re just bringing attention to it – like the water.
Ajahn Sumedho
Working with today
Accept – then act.
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.
Always work with it, not against it
Eckhart Tolle
photo pygarcia
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