…You come, dreaming of ferns and flowers
and new leaves unfolding
upon the brash turnip-hearted skunk cabbage…
…Your kneel beside it. The smell
is lurid and flows in the most
unabashed way…
…but these are the woods you love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again – a miracle…
…What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.
Mary Oliver, Skunk Cabbage
Through recognizing the distinction between appearance and illusion, you give yourself permission to acknowledge that some of your perceptions may be wrong or biased, that your ideas of how things are may have solidified to the degree that you cannot see any other point of view but your own. When I began to recognize the emptiness and clarity of my own mind, my life became richer in ways I never could have imagined. Once I shed my ideas about how things should be, I became free to respond to my experience exactly as it was and exactly as I was, right there, right then.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living
Essential for working with what is unknown is an attitude of unknowing.
This leaves room for the phenomenon itself to speak.
It alone may keep us from delusions
James Hilmann, The Dream and the Underworld
photo: Solveig Askjem
Moments of natural meditation are happening to us all the time. We pause at a stop sign while driving or taking a walk, just for a moment, preoccupations of that important meeting tomorrow or memories of yesterday’s flood of emails fall away. We are simply there, noticing other walkers and drivers, cars and sunlight, clouds and trees. A dog barks, and in the distance we hear a siren. For a fleeting moment we have a more intense experience of simple presence.
Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness
Our capacity for surprise is often an unused blessing. With every appearance, it prods us to ask, “Beneath our problem-solving, what is life asking of us”? “Beneath our ideas of happiness or suffering, what does it really mean to live”? So often we try to change things, only to find that our honest engagement with experience often changes us. In trying to make life fit our needs, our sense of need is often softened or broken, until we fit life.
Mark Nepo, The Gift of Surprise
Photo: Steve Evans, Monastery Door, Ladakh,
My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.
When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.
“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—
otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.“
Naomi Shihab Nye, The Words Under the Words
