Therefore, whatever feeling, past, future or present, internal or external, ….. must be regarded with proper wisdom, in this way:
‘This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self.’
The Buddha, Anatta-lakkhana Sutta: The Discourse on the Not-self Characteristic
We are encouraged to drop the storyline and simply pause, look out, and breathe. Simply be present for a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours, a whole lifetime, with our own shifting energies and with the unpredictability of life as it unfolds, wholly partaking in all experiences just exactly as they are. What I’m advocating is that in that precious moment we start to make choices that lead to happiness and freedom rather than choices that lead to unnecessary suffering and the obscuration of our intelligence, our warmth, our capacity to remain open and present with the natural movement of life.
Pema Chodron
We must learn to hold the tension between the reality of the moment and the possibility that something better might emerge. The insight at the heart of nonviolence is that we live in a tragic gap – a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be. It is a gap that never has been and never will be closed. If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility in hopes of being opened to a third way.
Parker J. Palmer
Keep asking “What idea of self have I dreamed up today?
Zenkei Blanche Hartman,1926-2016, Soto Zen teacher
The monk who bakes bread
no longer believes in the measure-for-measure God of the recipe books,
has little faith, if any, in the predestined endings set forth by timers,
the finely sifted claims to inerrancy held by cups and spoons.
Blended to life, call his a leavened devotion to resurrection
appearing from within each cracked tomb of grain,
the hunger that presses his hands dawn after dawn,
deep into the just-risen flesh.
Cowl white as the flour he scoops, mixes,
forms pat pat into loaves shaped like naves,
it is his chest, filled with the invisible yeast of breath,
that knows by heart the patient kneading together of days,
how long love takes to rise.
Daniel Skach-Mills, American poet.
Joy is the happiness
that doesn’t depend on what happens
David Steindl-Rast
