Tag: Awareness

The stories that keep us back

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game. It can be quite disorienting to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true – it actually never was true. Not now not ever. There is another form of obsolescence that can fray at the cocoon we have spun about ourselves, that is, the story was true at one time, and for an extended period; the story was even true and good to us, but now it is no longer true and no longer of any benefit, in fact our continued retelling of it simply imprisons us.

David Whyte

photo Uwe H. Friese

 

Each moment

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Hechingen BarefootPark kerscher01.jpg

Most of us wonder from time to time how to give meaning to some days:

A Lord asked Takuan how he might pass the time, as his days were long in the office,

sitting stiffly to receive the homage of others.

Takuan wrote these 8 Chinese characters and gave them to him:

“Not twice this day

Inch time foot gem

This day will not come again

Each minute is worth a priceless gem”

Takuan Sōhō 1573 –  1645, Japanese Zen Buddhist Master

photo Lorenz Kerscher

Fresh starts

Karl Duffy7 Comments

File:Love-romantic-date-candlelight (23958771669).jpg

A friend reminded me yesterday that it is all about starting each day anew, with fresh eyes –  like lighting a candle in the darkness and seeing things in the glow of a kind light:

I’m heading into 2017 aspiring to look at life through the eyes of a child. Buddhists call it “beginner’s mind” — a corrective to the cynicism that comes when we let hard realities darken our vision and diminish our imagination. It’s a way of looking at the world that doesn’t deny the darkness, but makes fresh starts possible in everything – from our personal to our political lives.

What’s “the growing edge” in your life?

Whatever it is, may 2017 be a year in which our adult powers dance with our child-like imaginations to help make all things new.

Parker Palmer

With thanks to makebelieveboutique.com

Saddened

Karl Duffy2 Comments
  • File:Underaged refugees in a camp located at the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, 30 January 2016.jpg

The Christian calendar is quite wise in placing the feast-day of the Slaughter of the Innocents today,  just immediately after the Christmas celebrations. It faces into the reality of this world, with the sad turns which we cannot understand, and the fact that we can lose that which is most important to us, due to factors which are unexpected or outside of our control.  It is the opposite to the distracting tactics which we see scattered all through the modern understanding of this holiday.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world

without being saddened very often.

Erich Fromm

photo Mstyslav Chernov

Underaged refugees in a camp located at the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, 30 January 2016.

To really see

Karl Duffy1 Comment

mary-oliver

The highest goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information,

but to face our moments as sacred

Abraham Herschel

What we remember

Karl Duffy6 Comments

File:Hanukkah candles 2015 (48).JPG

We do not remember days,

We remember moments

Cesare Pavese 1908 – 1950 Italian poet and novelist