Tag: balance

Sunday Quote: Attention

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What you look hard at

seems to look hard at you.

Gerald Manley Hopkins

Each matter

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You should speak appropriately about the affairs of your own life,

for each matter you encounter

constitutes the meaning of your existence.

Mazu Daoyi, 709–88, renowned ancient Chinese Zen master

Reality, as it is

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Zen is not some fancy, special art of living.

Our teaching is just to live,

always in reality, in its exact sense.

 Shunryu Suzuki Roshi 

Ordinary

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We need to remember that in sharp contrast to … self-seeking exceptionality, God works through the ordinary. Meister Eckhart gives us a word here: “If you are doing anything special, you’re not seeking God.”

Maggie Ross, Anglican hermit and theologian

Sunday Quote: Two sides

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Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Manon, Ballerina

mundane miracles

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Today is Candlemas, another ancient feast, this one dating from the 4th Century in the Christian tradition, reflecting a need to mark this moment – halfway between the winter and the spring solstices – by bringing light into the darkness. 

Spirit, use me today, not in some miracle that

would make others marvel, and would make me proud.

Not in the word of wisdom, that would stay in the mind

and make me remembered.

Not in the heroic act, that would change the world for the better

and me for the worse.

But in the mundane miracles, of honesty and truth,

that keep the sky from falling.

In the unremembered quiet words, that keep a soul on the path.

And in the unnoticed acts, that keep the world moving

slowly closer to the light.

Grahame Davis, Prayer