More and more stuff

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If you know how to be happy with the wonders of life that are already there for you to enjoy, you don’t need to stress your mind and your body by striving harder and harder, and you don’t need to stress this planet by purchasing more and more stuff.

Much of our modern way of life is permeated by mindless overborrowing. The more we borrow, the more we lose. That’s why it’s critical that we wake up and see we don’t need to do that anymore. What’s already available in the here and now is plenty for us to be nourished, to be happy. Only that kind of insight will get us, each one of us, to stop engaging in the compulsive, self-sabotaging behaviours of our species.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Fresh moments

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Life dances and you have to dance with it, whether it is taking you on a wonderful ride or is stepping on your toes. This is the necessary price and transcendent gift of being incarnate; alive in a body. But it is just life dancing. Life will move you in the rhythm and direction of its own nature.

Each moment is a fresh moment in the dance, and if you are lost in clinging to the past or clinging to your fears of the future, you are not present for the dance.

Philip Moffitt

Sunday Quote: What traps us

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power

but self-rejection

Henri Nouwen

Reassurance

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The reason why men are so anxious to see themselves,

instead of being content to be themselves,

is that they do not really believe in their own existence. 

Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Life

Nothing fixed

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A monk asked “What is the substance of a true person?”

The Master said “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter”

The monk said “Put like that, it is hard for me to understand”

The Master said “You asked about the substance of a true person, didnt you?”

Traditional Zen koan dialogue

The accumulation of unnecessary goods

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As the author says, we need to change our stories.

[The] four stories at the heart of western imperial civilisation….have profound ecological implications.

There is the ‘prosperity story’ which promotes worship of material acquisition and money, the ‘biblical story’ which focuses on the afterlife rather than the world around us, the ‘security story’ which builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination, and the ‘secular meaning story’ which reduces life to matter and mechanism.

These are not, however, stories in the usual sense of narratives. They exist behind and between the lines of the texts that surround us – the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline profits are up…

[…] underneath common ways of writing and speaking in industrial societies are stories about unlimited economic growth as being not just possible but the goal of society, of the accumulation of unnecessary goods as a path towards self-improvement, of progress and success defined narrowly in terms of technological innovation and profit, and of nature as something separate from humans, a mere stock of resources to be exploited.

Arran Stibbe, Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By