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
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
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
The highest goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information,
but to face our moments as sacred
Abraham Herschel
We do not remember days,
We remember moments
Cesare Pavese 1908 – 1950 Italian poet and novelist
Friday…a little more space appears…we can perhaps notice the beauty all around us, in the little things, new colours, some time for ourselves:
I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do.
The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me; the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel,
the unutterable muddiness of mud…
GK Chesterton
