A huge change in the weather yesterday and today, and objectively it is much grayer here. However, had a number of meetings with people who reveal an inner light and a courage in the face of difficulties. It is love which brightens each day and the capacity to appreciate what we have, not wishing things be different.
We are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
William Blake
The art of living…is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past….on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
Alan Watts, The Wisdon of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Uncertainty
Meditation begins 
now, right here. If you wish to free yourself from the frantic television mind that runs our lives, begin with the intention to be present now. Nobody can bring awareness to your life but you.
Meditation is not a self-help program – a way to better ourselves so we can get what we want. Nor is it a way to relax before jumping back into busyness. It’s not something to do once in a while, either, whenever you happen to feel like it. Instead, meditation is a practice that saturates your life and in time can be brought into every activity. It is the transformation of mind from bondage to freedom. In practicing meditation, we go nowhere other than right here where we now stand, where we now sit, where we now live and breathe. In meditation we return to where we already are – this shifting, changing ever-present now.
Steve Hagen
Loss of mindfulness is why people engage in useless pursuits,
do not care for their own interests,
and remain unalarmed in the presence of things which actually menace their welfare.
Buddha
The word ‘meditation’ can mean all kinds of things. It’s a word that includes any kind of mental practices, good or bad. But when I use this word, what I’m mainly using it for is that sense of centring, that sense of establishing, resting in the centre. The only way that one can really do that is not to try and think about it and analyse 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….The more I pay attention and I’m aware, the more I recognise that in this still point there’s this resounding sound of silence.
Ajahn Sumedo
Meditation is a special kind of dance in which we commit ourselves wholeheartedly to the practice of deconstructing the materialistic view of reality. The challenge is simultaneously to hold on and to let go; it is to see clearly what we are doing and at the same time see through it.
Ajahn Amaro
