Open the window to the west, and disappear into the air inside you.
Near your breast bone there is an open flower.
Drink the honey that is around that flower.
Kabir
Tag: balance
Preoccupied with expectation
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is.
Alan Watts
Stillness
The ten directions converging,
Each learning to do nothing,
This is the classroom of the Buddha’s training;
Mind’s empty, all’s finished.
P’ang Yün (Layman Pang) died 808, famous lay practitioner of Ch’an
Life is better when we flow
Most of us are persistent. We have persistently tried to change what we cannot, usually a circumstance or someone else’s behavior. Take that energy, that persistence, that determination, that almost obsessive resolve, and persevere with the things you can do. Don’t push. Let go of concern about the seemingly impossible tasks in your life. Softly, steadily, like the rain, let your kind spirit naturally remove the obstacles in your path. Life is better when we flow. But sometimes it takes a persistent flow to change the things we can. Enough water, persistently applied, can be more powerful than rock.
Melodie Beatty, More Language of Letting Go: 366 New Daily Meditations
Sunday Quote: Dazzled
It must be a great disappointment to God
if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day
Mary Oliver, Blue Horses
The quiet ordinary things
Happiness is
in the quiet, ordinary things.
A table,
a chair,
a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages.
And the petal falling from the rose,
and the light flickering
as we sit silent.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Mindfulbalance 