It isn’t the things that happen to us that cause us to suffer;
it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.
photo of a robin sheltering from the wind and the rain by phil sangwell
Familiar stories
We can have a lot of stories about how our lives are heading, or what our strengths and weaknesses are, or why things are not going as the should go…
One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game. It can be quite disorientating to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true – it never was true…In fact, the continued retelling of it simply imprisons us. We are used to the prison, however, we have indeed fitted cushions and armchairs and made it comfortable and have locked the door from the inside.
David Whyte, Letter from the House, Winter 2012
Sunday Quote: Spontaneity
We need the tonic of wildness
Thoreau
We never really arrive
Some people want it pure white
but sweep as you may,
you can’t empty the mind
Keizan Jokin, 1268 – 1325, second founder of Soto Zen
photo gloumouth1
Just this moment
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now...
Mary Oliver, One or Two things
photo david shankbone
Always needing something
What we sense as self is always changing and unsatisfactory. The sense of self always has to have something or do something. It wants to be approved of by somebody, or be busy winning at something, or be analysing itself or trying to wipe itself out. It is always orbiting around some need or another. There’s the need to know something, or have an opinion; or the need to feel one’s doing good enough; the need to feel that one is useful; the need to feel that other people like me. The need to be the same as everyone else. Or the need to be different from everyone else. Or, different on some days, the same on other days. And the need to be able to change from being same to being different when I need to. And so on – it never really settles.
Ajahn Sucitto, Good Enough
photo ketterechts
