Some events, like hearing a bird singing early this morning, make it easy to be fully present. We are not remembering another bird, another moment.
I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of inflections
or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
photo m.betley
What does it mean to see each other exactly as we are? Past memories about ourselves and each other are not how we are right now. Memory is an incomplete and inaccurate recording of the past. Now is something entirely different. Quietly looking and listening now is not memory. It is an entirely different mode of being, It is a cleansing of perception.
Toni Packer, The Work of this Moment
We pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye, clear.
What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
photo rspb
It flows on without stopping
Through thousands and thousands of turns.
“A moment before thought” is
Already wrong thinking.
To try to say anything more
Is embarrassing.
T’aego, Korean Zen master, 1301–1382
.
There is a quick-fix mentality in Ireland and elsewhere today, which even apply to ways of working on ourselves – like the latest surefire diet, or radio interviews which imply that an instant mindfulness session will cure all ills. At the heart of these is a vision of quick change which encourages us to strive and push to achieve. We think that we need to control everything and impose ourselves upon it. While useful at times, this sometimes can mean that we are never happy with anything, including ourselves. Meditation practice encourages a different way, of letting things come to us instead. We sit in meditation and create space, allowing things unfold in their own time.
To push your self forward to experience and illuminate the millions of things, that is delusion.
When the millions of things come forward and illuminate themselves, that is freedom
Dogen, GenjoKoan
Seek patience
and passion
in equal amounts.
Patience alone
will not build the temple.
Passion alone
will destroy its walls.
Maya Angelou
photo Golden Temple, Kyoto by Ellywa
