Since there is nothing but just this moment
The time-being
is all the time there is.
Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Buddhist priest and writer, founder of the Soto school of Zen, Shōbōgenzō
Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into it and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route of becoming.
All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the tough core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in your world, and to come into your own.
Difficulty is always a school, though learning is optional.
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
We’re not trying to stand in the middle of something, and know that the situation will pass.
We’re trying to stand in the middle of it and know that our overwhelm will pass.
That’s what’s passing. The situation itself may take a long while, and we have to do some effort in it. But what we’re aimed at, as practitioners, is to first let our overwhelm pass, let it be, let it rise and fall as all emotions do.
Tuere Sala
Within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE.
And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson