The subtle suffering in our lives may seem unimportant. But if we attend to the small ways that we suffer, we create a context of greater ease, peace, and responsibility, which can make it easier to deal with the bigger difficulties when they arise.
Gil Fronsdal Living Two Traditions
Each one of us has a place to live, be it Ireland, France, Switzerland or the USA. And each of us has a set of current circumstances with which to live. These are our “plots of land”. It is by working with things as they are that we are challenged to find contentment
As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found – in himself.
Erich Fromm
No matter what the situation is,
we are responsible for our own mind states
Joseph Goldstein
We have never, not for a single day, the pure space before us, in which flowers
unendingly burst open.
It is always world and never nowhere without no:
that pureness, that unwatched, which one breathes and
endlessly knows and never wants
Rilke, Duino Elegies
What flower will we miss today, because we wish we were elsewhere or think we have something “better” to do?
One day the Buddha held up a flower in front of an audience of 1,250 monks and nuns. He did not say anything for quite a long time. The audience was perfectly silent. Everyone seemed to be thinking hard, trying to see the meaning behind the Buddha’s gesture. Then, suddenly, the Buddha smiled. He smiled because someone in the audience smiled at him and at the flower.
To me the meaning is quite simple. When someone holds up a flower and shows it to you, he wants you to see it. If you keep thinking you miss the flower. The person who was not thinking, who was just himself, was able to encounter the flower in depth, and he smiled. That is the problem of life. If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step
