Observe

So easy this week in Ireland, with beautiful Indian Summer days bathing the fields in light

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.
Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry
moving through, and be silent.

Rumi

Another moment, another chance

 I know now, 
after fifty years, 
that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, 
leaving/returning, never stops.
The whole of life is about another chance

Jeanette Winterson, Why be Happy when you Could Be Normal?

Being as is

The wise person man, perceiving wealth and craving,
Knows them to be empty illusion;

Food and clothes sustain our body and life;

But I advise you to learn

Being as is.

When it’s time,  I leave my hermitage and go,

And there’s nothing to be left behind

Layman Pang, 740 – 808, Chinese Chan layman

Recognizing, not pursuing

In my life-long impatience, how much I have missed. Last night, washing the dishes, I really looked at my iron frying pan in the dishwater. The light made visible for a moment a tiny rainbow — a light through water revealing all the colors of life. It is so easy to miss the tiny symbols. Finding them is quite different from the business of trying to hatch up big symbolic experiences. It is recognition, not pursuit, of meaning — recognition of the sacramental, of the intersection of the two worlds, breaking through unsought because one is attending.

Helen Luke, 1904 – 1995, Jungian Analyst and writer

Sunday Quote: Stillness

To meet everyone and everything through stillness instead of mental noise

is the greatest gift you can offer to the universe.

Eckhart Tolle

Time for ourselves

 

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurry world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude

Wordsworth, The Prelude