If you want to see to the depths, you will need to slow down. . . .
Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary.
There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels.
Macrina Wiederkehr, Benedictine nun and spiritual writer.
Every stretch of time, whether an inch or a foot, is priceless. Life is made of these units, and each is an opportunity for mindfulness.
Not twice this day
Inch time, foot gem.
This day will not come again.
Each minute is worth a priceless gem.
Response of Takuan, 1573 – 1645, Zen teacher, when asked by a lord who asked how should we “pass the time.”
Summer Solstice
The person sees the morning as the beginning of a new day; takes germination as the start in the life of a plant, and withering as its end.
But this is nothing more than biased judgment on his part.
Nature is one.
There is no starting point or destination, only an unending flux, a continuous metamorphosis of all things.
Masanobu Fukuoka, 1913 – 2008, Japanese farmer and philosopher
If you put down the stories you tell yourself about your life for one minute, what remains?
Let go of a hundred years;
Rest from the ten thousand concerns.
Let go with both hands and walk on,
Free from judgment and division
Shitou Xiqian, Chan Master and hermit, 700–790 Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage
Silence is fruitful only when it leads to interior peace and stillness.
Contemplation is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
You do not find it by travelling, but by standing still.
Thomas Merton
Once, when I was particularly depressed, a friend and pacifist from Holland told me something very beautiful: “The people who worked to build the cathedrals in the Middle Ages never saw them completed. It took two hundred years and more to build them. Some stonecutter somewhere sculpted a beautiful rose; it was his life’s work, and it was all he ever saw. But he never entered into the completed cathedral.
But one day, the cathedral was really there.
You must imagine peace the same way
Dorothee Soelle, Against the Wind
