In the presence of

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Gnf

Joy is the meeting place of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us .. with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.

To allow our selves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well loved familiar face – I was here and you were here and together we made a world.

David Whyte ,  Consolations : The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Sunday Quote: Jump

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Forget safety.

Live where you fear to live

Rumi

photo calyponte

Learning to be calm

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Now and again the earth begins to desire rest. And in the weeks of autumn especially it shows its disposition to calm, to what feels like a stasis, a pause. The ocean retains its warmth, while high white cloud-boats ride out of the west. Now the birds of the woods are often quiet, but on the shore, the migrating sanderlings and plovers are many and vocal, rafts of terns with the year’s young among them come with the incoming tides, and plunge into the waves, and rise with silver leaves in their beaks. One can almost see the pulsing of their hearts, vigorous and tiny in the trim of white feathers.  Where I live, on the harbor edge of the Cape’s last town, perfect strangers walking along the beach turn and say to each other, without embarrassment or hesitation: isn’t it beautiful.

Mary Oliver, Where I Live

photo mozzercork @ flickr

 

Clearing a space

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Our intention is to affirm this life –  not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation – but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it’s own accord.

John Cage, 1912 -1992 American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist.

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Preparing to live or living?

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File:US Navy 101113-M-2581P-006 Marine Corps Gen. James F. Amos, center, and Sgt. Maj. of the Marine Corps Carlton W. Kent, right, present a framed cert.jpg

We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Complete right now

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Enlightenment involves derailing and deconstructing the sense of lack.   It is getting rid of that piece of psychology that in every moment says, ‘There’s something else that I should be having right now. There’s something else that I should be right now. There’s somewhere else that I could go right now. There’s somebody else who’s got it better than me right now. I’m not complete right now. I need to be something right now”.

Ajahn Sucitto, Parami: Ways to Cross Life’s Floods

photo sookie