An eye is meant to see things.
The soul is here for its own joy.
A head has one use: To love a genuine love.
Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind
when it only wants to see why.
A lover is always accused of something.
But when they find their love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back completely changed.
Rumi, Night and Sleep
Usually we think of our mind as receiving impressions from outside, but that is not a true understanding
The true understanding is that the mind includes everything.
Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble.
You yourself make the waves in your mind
If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm
This mind is called big mind
Shunryu Suzuki roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Everything changes once we identify with being
the witness to the story,
instead of the actor in it,
Ram Dass
The most prophetic thing Thomas Merton ever did was to say to a shopkeeper who asked him what brand of toothpaste he preferred, “I don’t care”. Merton was intrigued by the store clerk’s response. “He almost dropped dead” he wrote, “I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or something with five colours. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn’t care about the secret ingredient ….the worst thing you can do now is not care about these things”
The ultimate goal of the marketer is to have us see consumer products not as mere things, but as keys to our identity. Brands are marks that owners put on their property …., and we are in perilous territory when our self-image, and even our self-worth, is founded on which brands and labels we can afford to purchase and display.
Kathleen Norris, The Secret Ingredient
What do I know
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example – I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch – the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the daisies for the field.
Mary Oliver, Daisies [extract]
Very grey these days in Ireland, not quite Summer weather….
When we are willing to be intimate with what actually is here now,
to look directly at all our experience,
we might recognize that this is our life
however different from our thoughts and ideas about it
Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Abbot of the Village Zendo, Soto Zen tradition, New York
Mindfulbalance 