I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
And they come toward me, to meet and be met.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
The quality of life is in proportion to the capacity for delight.
The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
May Sarton
Meditation’ can mean all kinds of things. But when I use this word, what I’m mainly using it for is that sense of centering, that sense of establishing, resting in the center. The only way that one can really do that is not to try and think about it and analyze it; you have to trust in just a simple act of attention, of awareness. It’s so simple and so direct that our complicated minds get very confused. “What’s he talking about? I’ve never found a still point in me. When I sit and meditate, there’s nothing still about it.” But there’s an awareness of that. Even if you think you’ve never had a still point or you’re a confused, messed-up character that really can’t meditate, trust in the awareness of that very perception. […]
Awareness is your refuge: Awareness of the changingness of feelings, of attitudes, of moods, of material change and emotional change: Stay with that, because it’s a refuge that is indestructible. It’s not something that changes. It’s a refuge you can trust in. This refuge is not something that you create. It’s not a creation. It’s not an ideal. It’s very practical and very simple, but easily overlooked or not noticed. When you’re mindful, you’re beginning to notice, it’s like this.
Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness
The lighthouse illuminates in a single beam of light. The monk rakes the sand in the garden in front of him. We try to keep our minds focused on the moment in hand, on the next breath in practice. We do not have to live the whole of the future now, just this moment, this breath.
Its vision sweeps its one path
like an aged monk raking a garden,
his question long ago answered or moved on.
Far off, night-grazing horses,
breath scented with oatgrass and fennel,
step through it, disappear, step through it, disappear
Jane Hirshfield, Lighthouse
Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. “You will not remember,” he seems to say, “and you will not expect.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles
Practice is about suspending those entrenched habits of mind that actually cut us off form the very weird fact of being here at all. We spend so much of our lives inhabiting a fictitious future or nostalgically indulging in memories and reminiscences that we fail to notice this extraordinary thing that is happening to us right now. It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.
Stephen Bachelor, in an interview with Wes Nisker, Inquiring Mind
A very common familiar analogy for being awake is the sun that is always shining behind the clouds. The clouds cover the sun, but the sun is still there….This precious unique moment is always here, always accessible to us. It never went anywhere. But we spend so much time pushing it away and resisting it and not liking the form in which it is happening, that we miss it. This is like the clouds coming in. We identify more with the clouds of our nature than with the sun. Pretty much, that happens again and again. What’s always available to us – which we can come back to, to connect with – is the vastness and openness of our heart and mind in any moment of time.
Pema Chodron, Clouds and Sun
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