We like to think that we are in control and directing things…
Let go of all your assumptions
And the world will make perfect sense
Chuang-tzu.
Tag: Awareness
A Saturday morning walk along country lanes in Ireland
This is the first, the wildest, and the wisest thing I know:
that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
Mary Oliver, Primroses
I thrive on long walks where I find myself slowing down to the rhythm of my own possibilities. That is my speed. There I find my breathing. I used to live in Thailand where the word for breathing, hai jai, is translated as ‘give your heart.’ This used to remind me that to breathe, and to simply be aware of that breath, is to give to your heart.
Jenny Kane, On Being Blog
photo : pokrojac
The meaning of our lives lies beneath the surface
The most important thing, in the show of the temporal and the transient,
is to recognize the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present.
Hegel, Works, VII, 17.
photo matt jigins
The wonder of this day
All that is eternal in me
Welcomes the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shells of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
To live the life I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
John O’Donohue, Morning Prayer
Small things
Whenever I stopped long enough to reflect on such questions as “Why am I here?” and “What is my purpose?” the answer seemed pretty clear. I actually found it long ago in some lines by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, words I’ve quoted often because they’ve served me so well as a kind of north star, timeless wisdom by which to navigate:
“Ours is not the task
of fixing the whole world at once
but of stretching out to mend
the part of the world that is within our reach”
Katrina Kenison, Mending the world
The stories that keep us back
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
