I saw the leaf leave the branch and float down to the soil, dancing joyfully,
because as it floated it saw itself already there in the tree.
It was so happy. I bowed my head,
and I knew that we have a lot to learn from the leaf
because it was not afraid;
it knew that nothing can be born and nothing can die.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Sometimes we try too hard, and then life has a way of revealing what we need
The early sun dissolves the mist
that has covered the mountain.
All night I have listened to the wise,
yet failed to learn.
Dimly, darkly, the eternal pines
rise without effort from the vanishing fog.
Xue Tao, c770–832, Chinese poet
Sun-faced Buddha and Moon-faced Buddha are metaphors used in Buddhism. The Sun-faced Buddha lives in the world for a long period – 1800 years or for eternity, the Moon- faced just for one day.
When we think about our human lives:
There are, as you know, people who live long, like those Sun-faced Buddhas, and there are people whose lives are short, like those Moon-faced Buddhas.
It’s useless to worry.
Baso Dōitsu 709 – 788 recorded in The Blue Cliff Record, a collection of Chan Buddhist koans compiled in 1125
One point that Ajahn Sumedho would stress regularly, is that loving things is not the same as liking them. Having kindness for ourselves or for other beings is not the same as liking everything.
We often come a cropper by trying to make ourselves like everything. This is a completely wrong approach. When we taste something that’s bitter and try to force ourselves to believe it’s sweet this is just falsity, it’s just sugaring things over. It doesn’t work. It just makes the bitter even worse….We’re not trying to like everything, rather we’re recognising that everything belongs. Everything is part of nature: the bitter as well as the sweet, the beautiful as well as the ugly, the cruel as well as the kindly. The heart that recognises that fundamentally everything belongs is what I would describe as being the heart of kindness, the essence of kindness.
Ajahn Amaro, Radical Acceptance
If you could only keep quiet,
– clear of memories and expectations –
you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events.
It is your restlessness that causes chaos.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, 1897 – 1981, Indian non dualist teacher
The last day of the year in the Christian calendar. Advent starts this evening
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
Galway Kinnell, Another Night in the Ruins
Mindfulbalance 