Once at a workshop, the instruction was to walk mindfully over to the lunchtime food across the room. In that short walk across the room, I noticed how automatically I get ahead of myself — how I lose track of these miraculous feet on the ground and miss the space in between. And I’m beginning to suspect that most of life is “in between“.
David Rynick, This Truth Never fails: A Zen memoir in Four Seasons
Buddhism teaches that joy and happiness arise from letting go.
Please take an inventory of your life
There are things that you’ve been hanging on to that really are not useful and deprive you of your freedom
Find the courage to let them go.
Thich Nhat Hanh
A new month.
Because in the end you won’t remember the time spent working in the office or mowing your lawn.
Climb that goddamn mountain
Jack Kerouac
Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble at any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.
Naomi Shibab Nye, The Art of Disappearing [extract]
It is not easy to free ourselves from the counting, comparing mind.
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come.
It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 3
For autumn and its slow growing fruition
For that season of ultimate rise and fall
We give thanks.
May we gracefully rise to the occasion of our own falling,
Giving ourselves just enough time to go beyond time
To the great Now
At the quiet center of the turning wheels.
David Steindl-Rast, osb, Thanksgiving Song
