Tag: Awareness

Something to remember today

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Life is not a problem to be solved,

but a Mystery to be lived.

Gabriel Marcel

A very good practice

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The present moment is where life can be found, and if you don’t arrive there you miss your appointment with life. You don’t have to run anymore. Breathing in, we say, “I have arrived.” Breathing out, we say, “I am home.” This is a very strong practice, a very deep practice.

Thich Nhat Hanh,  The Present Moment

Taking time to get less done

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Coming out of the movie, I realized that I want what the crones have: time for all those long deep breaths, time to watch more closely, time to learn to enjoy what I’ve always been afraid of – the sad and the invisibility; the ease of understanding that life is not about doing. The crones understand this, and it gives them all kinds of time – time to get much less done, time for all the holy moments.

Anne Lamott, Travelling Mercies

When we are unhappy

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As I have written before, Jacques Lusseyran was a French writer who took part in the Resistance against the German Occupation, and he continued to organize groups against the Nazis even after he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. His work was all the more striking because he was totally blind from the age of 8, following an accident at school. His experiences give him a certain authority when it comes to reflections on what makes for contentment or unhappiness:

Unhappiness, I saw then, comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the center of the world, because we have the miserable conviction that we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity. Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one’s own skin, in one’s own brain.

Jacques Lusseyran.

Human beings, not human doings

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I have merged, like the bird, with the bright air,

And my thought flies to the place by the bo-tree.

Being, not doing, is my first joy.

Theodore Roethke.  American poet

This will never come again

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That it will never come again, Is what makes life so sweet. Emily Dickenson

What exactly is Emily Dickenson writing about. She’s writing about just this.  This wonderful, clear, bright, blue day. It won’t come again. There will be other, very similar days, no doubt. But this day will not return. And you sitting here reading this, you will not sit down in this same way, with these same thoughts and feelings. None of this will be the same again. Even as you set down this book and leave the room, you’ll not be the person who walked in. This will never come again. This is always the case. That this will never come again is what it actually means to be born again and again. We and indeed the whole world are born repeatedly, over and over, in each new moment…What makes human life – which is inseparable from this moment – so precious, is its fleeting nature.

Steve Hagan, Buddhism is Not what You Think

Photo : Assisi, Early Morning, Easter