Grace and wonder and mystery

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Everything we need or want is waiting inside each day … right before us in flawed abundance …nothing is clean or perfect, and nothing unfolds as planned.  For the Universe is vital, not perfect.  Full of endless seeds attempting to be one thing, colliding with another, and becoming a third.

 One of the more difficult paradoxes to accept is that this abundance of gifts is always quietly present and it is we who drift in and out of seeing it.  The one recurring doorway to this vitality is our simple participation in life.  When we slip into heartless watching, the abundance seems to vanish.  When we dare to show up and be fully present, grace and wonder and mystery start to appear, even in the midst of pain.  Not as planned dreams, or as images of lovers, or as scripts of success designed by our fantasies of ourselves.  But as oddly shaped pods of vitality bursting to multiply and bring us further into the mystery of living.

Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk.

photo anemoneprojectors

Lightly

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly, lightly – its the best advice ever given me, so throw away your baggage and  go forward.

Aldous Huxley, Island

photo agence comas you are

Eyes fixed on the present

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We don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Howard Zinn, US Historian, playwright, and social activist

photo gordon hatton

Limits and choices

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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To live wisely, we must recognize that there are two fundamental truths of a human life. The first is that we have a limited and undefined amount of time — it may be 100 years, it may be 30. The second is that in that limited and undefined amount of time we have an almost unlimited number of choices of how to use our time — the things we choose to focus on and put our energy into — and these choices will ultimately define our lives.

When we are born there is no owner’s manual provided, and the clock begins ticking the moment we arrive.  We do not like the words “die” and “death.” Many human activities are designed to shield us from the truth about life; that it is limited, that at least here in this place, we do not have forever. Still, it is the fact that we die and that our time is limited that makes discovering the secrets to life important. If we lived forever, there would be little urgency to discover the true paths to happiness and purpose since given the luxury of eternity we would surely stumble on them sooner or later. This is a luxury we do not have.

John Izzo, The Five Secrets you must Discover before Your Die

photo AuntTT83

Sunday Quote: Free

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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If you don’t break your ropes
while you’re alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?

Kabir

photo: maizeam

Accompanying

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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‘Compassion’, when literally translated,  means ‘ suffering with others’ and ‘with’ is the most important word, because it implies belonging. ‘Companion’ is ‘one who travels with another’.  So in this relationship there is no guide, there is no healer and no one healed; we simply accompany one another.

 As we inquire into the heart of service, we see a pattern: common to all habits that hinder us in our work is a sense of separateness; and common to all those moments and actions that truly seem to serve is the experience of unity.  As my friend Reb Anderson says, “We are simply walking through birth and death holding hands.”

Frank Ostaseski

photo takato marui