My eyes already touch the sunny hill
going far ahead of the road I have begun
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp
It has its inner light even from a distance
and changes us even if we do not reach it
into something else, which hardly sensing it, we already are.
Rainer Maria Rilke
photo: oregon department of transportation
If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted with pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It’s that simple. What you see is what you get
Annie Dilliard
photo marilia melhado
Stop talking, Stop thinking
And there is nothing that you will not understand
Seng-Ts’an, Third Chinese Patriarch
photo donald bain
I don’t know where prayers go, or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.
While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?
Mary Oliver, I Happened to Be Standing
photo sylvain haye
He thought that if he stood on the bottom rail of the bridge and leant over,
and watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him,
then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known.
A. A Milne, The House at Pooh Corner, chapter 6
Through mindfulness practice you began to experience how conditioned the world is and how these conditions constantly change. To free ourselves, we need to quieten the mind through some mindfulness in meditation. Then, instead of identifying with the changing conditions, we learn to release them and turn toward consciousness itself, to rest in the knowing. Ajahn Chah called this pure awareness, “the original mind,” and resting in “the one who knows.” We can be in the midst of an experience, being upset or angry or caught by some problem, and then step back from it and rest in pure awareness. We let go.
Jack Kornfield, This Fantastic, Unfolding Experiment
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