There is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.
David Whyte, What to Remember when Waking [extract]
It’s OK – in one sense – simply because it is here now, not because it is necessarily nice or what we wanted.
Accept – then act.
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.
Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform .your whole life
Eckhart Tolle
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash – at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
..The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
Practice sitting like a mountain sometime,
allowing all images and feelings and sensations to come and go as you reside in steadfastness, watching it all arise and pass away.
This is an image of equanimity
We feel everything, without exception, and we relate to it through our own strength of awareness, not through habitual reactions
Sharon Salzberg
Decisions,
not conditions,
determine what a person is
Viktor Frankl
The hardest thing I’ve learned,
and still struggle with,
is that I don’t have to be finished in order to be whole.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
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