Tag: Awareness

Beauty Changes

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Today is Candlemas in the Christian tradition, the lighting of candles to look towards the end of winter, layered on the earlier Celtic feast of Imbolc.

Beauty changes; it’s not static. The seasons change. All the leaves fall off the trees, all the flowers disappear. Everything becomes bleak in winter when there is hardly any noticeable contrast, except in shades of dark and light. Now we might say that spring is more beautiful than winter, if we prefer vibrant colors, beautiful flowers, an the kind of energy that spring brings. But if we open our minds, we also begin to recognize the subtle beauty of winter. We can appreciate the lack of color and silence of winter as much as the energy of spring.

This appreciation comes from not having opinions about things being perfect in a static way. It comes from seeing that the rose is a perfect rose in spring, summer, autumn and winter. For static perfection, you need a plastic rose, but that’s never as satisfying.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way

Process and flow

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The first day of Spring in the older Celtic tradition

By gently letting go of everything – not through force, not by slaying it, but simply seeing all the content as a passing show, as process and flow – we become the whole of our experience and open to our natural understanding.

If fear or wanting arises, it is seen within the spaciousness that surrounds it. We don’t get lost by becoming it, but simply see it as just another moment in the mind flow, another something which arose uninvited and will pass away in the same manner.

Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening

A soft gaze

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Most of our suffering comes from having a fixed view of how life, or this day, should go…

For things to reveal themselves to us

we need to be ready to abandon our views about them

Thich Nhat Hahn

Resting In How Things Are

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Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities.

Geshe Shawopa 1070–1141(?), quoted in Patrul Rinpoche, The Words of my Perfect teacher

Sunday Quote: Whats not wrong

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We often ask, ‘what’s wrong?’  Doing so, we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger, and depression, and produce more such seeds. We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us. We should learn to ask, ‘what’s not wrong?’ and be in touch with that.

One of my favourite thoughts from Thich Nhat Hahn, who died yesterday, aged 95

Nothing to Seek

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Birth, old age, Sickness, and death:

From the beginning this is the way things have always been.

Any thought of release from this life will wrap you only more tightly in its snares.

The sleeping person looks for a Buddha, The troubled person turns toward meditation.

But the one who knows that there’s nothing to seek, knows too that there’s nothing to say.

She keeps her mouth closed.

Ly Ngoc Kieu, 1041 – 1113, Vietnamese zen Buddhist nun.

Translation Thich Nhat Hahn and Jane Hirshfield