The art of life is a constant adjustment to our surroundings
Okakura Kakuzo, 1862 – 1913, Japanese scholar and writer
photo Evelyn Simak
Tag: Acceptance
Saying yes
I rarely let the word “no” escape
from my mouth
because it is plain to my soul
that God has shouted “Yes, Yes, Yes!”
to every luminous moment of existence.
Hafiz
Change
All things change when we do
The first word “Ah”
blossoms into others
All of them true.
Kukai, 774–835, Japanese monk, civil servant, scholar, poet.
As the week begins
Mysteriously, wonderfully,
I bid farewell to what goes
I greet what comes;
for what comes cannot be denied
and what goes cannot be detained
Chuang Tzu
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
(But where are the snows of yesteryear?)
French saying
photo of last fridays Spring weather in Kildare
The path
We can learn to recognize that the difficulty is our path instead of trying to escape from it. This is a radical yet necessary change in our perspective. When uncomfortable things happen to us, we rarely want to have anything to do with them. We might respond with the belief ‘Things shouldn’t be this way’ or ‘Life shouldn’t be so messy.’ Who says? Who says that life shouldn’t be a mess? When life is not fitting our expectations of how it’s supposed to be, we usually try to change it to fit our expectations. But the key to practice is not to try to change our life but to change our relationship to our expectations — to learn to see whatever is happening as our path.
Ezra Bayda, Being Zen
photo philip halling
As they are
To trust in things being as they are is the secret of life.
But we don’t want to hear that.
I can absolutely trust that in the next year, my life is going to be changed, different…
but always just the way it is.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Mindfulbalance 