The purpose of meditation is to come back to who we actually are.
We are not only the often harried and worried self we feel we are.
Nor the one excited by the prospect of pleasures to enjoy, and fearful of losing out on them
Henry Shukman
Worried
our importance
Most of our energy goes into upholding our importance.
If we were capable of losing some of that importance….We would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur;
and we would provide ourselves with enough energy to catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe.
Carlos Castaneda
Starting back
Lent and Ramadan both start this week : invitations to reflect.
Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry.
To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it.
This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.
Mark Nepo, Unlearning Back to God
Distinguish
Today is Pancake Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday. In Latin countries, it marks the end of the Carnival period, Mardi Gras or “Fat Tuesday”. The practice of carnival probably began in ancient times when the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent was called Dominica Carnevala, or “farewell to meat Sunday” – referring to the upcoming Lenten period of fasting and simplification
.Simplify the problem of life:
distinguish the necessary and the real.
Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.
Thoreau
difficult times
Remember to keep a calm head in difficult times
[aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem]
Horace, Odes, book II, poem III, lines 1 – 2
Sunday Quote: the real hell
In hell, you are so bound to yourself
that grace cannot enter.
Joseph Campbell
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