Tag: Awareness

Our schedules….

Karl Duffy2 Comments

I wake clear and rested, light flooding my room. The day seems endless and free.

But making coffee, I notice three bills I haven’t paid and after showering I notice I need a haircut, and since I’ll be out that way, I think I might as well pick up my shirts. But I so want to spend time in the sun. So I think, well, after these errands, I’ll go to the park, and then I deliberate which park will be just right and decide on one forty minutes away. Finally, wanting to make sure there is some fun in all of this, I call a friend and plan to meet her at a movie at six.

Now I have to hurry along to make sure I can get everywhere on time. But, thankfully, while gassing up, I hear a small bird and lift my head just as a cloud opens and the light floods my mind, and I drop all my plans like change on the ground.

I laugh at myself. I can so easily become a slave to a schedule I create.

Not one of these things is necessary today. I drop everything and follow the bird.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Another chance

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I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops.

The whole of life is about another chance,

and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

Jeanette Winterson

Sunday Quote: Wounds

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The great challenge is
living your wounds through
instead of thinking them through…

Your heart is greater than your wounds.

Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love

…and now

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Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now.

Love mercy, now.

Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

The Talmud

The here ….

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Healing is coming to terms with the actuality of things.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Darkness and light

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We blink a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day the world goes dark. A thousand times a day we wake. We can’t escape this opening and closing. Even as you read this, your eyes, along with your heart and mind, are blinking –  opening and closing repeatedly, no matter what you do. It is part of being human.

Yet so much depends on which you see as home – being open or closed. Do you see life as one stream of light interspersed with nights of dark, or as one stream of darkness interspersed with days of light? Though there will never be an answer, what we believe about the nature of life matters. It lifts or burdens our days. So ask yourself, more than once, Is life one long miracle of feeling interspersed with moments of breaking? Do we repeatedly fall into our humanness from never-ending light? Or is life one long painful breaking interspersed with moments of wonder? Do we struggle up from the unending dark briefly into glimpses of light?

Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening