Re-examine all you have been told
at school or church or in any book;
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem,
and have the richest fluency, not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
and in every motion and joint of your body.
Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition
Looking down into my father’s
dead face
for the last time
my mother said without
tears, without smiles
without regrets
but with civility
“Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you
in the morning.”
And it was then I knew that the healing
of all our wounds
is forgiveness
that permits a promise
of our return
at the end.
Alice Walker, Collected Poems
When we are willing to be intimate with what actually is here now, to look directly at all of our experience, we might recognize that this is our life, however different from our thoughts and ideas about it. It is as if we hunker down and actually get very real, recognizing that our thoughts of gaining and losing, good and bad, happy and sad, are what distance us from ourselves.
Once Dongshan was asked, ‘What is the deepest truth? What is the wisdom that liberates?’
His response was, ‘I am always close to this.’
It is the closeness itself – the intimacy with what is here with us now – that is the truth that liberates us.
Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Most Intimate: A Zen Approach to Life’s Challenges
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation
but your thoughts about it
Eckhart Tolle
In this lovely teaching, we are reminded of the need to start over and over again in each moment.
Alert to the needs of the journey
those on the path of awareness
like swans, glide on,
leaving behind their former resting places
Dhammapada 91
It’s a holiday Monday here…easier to start the week with gentle routines
The search is the meaning, the search for beauty, love, kindness and restoration in this difficult, wired and often alien modern world. The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be. This idea overwhelms some people. I have found that the wonder of life is often most easily recognizable through habits and routines – If you don’t do ritual things in order, the paper doesn’t read as well, and you’ll be thrown off the whole day. But when you can sit for a while at your table, reach for your coffee, look out the window at the sky or some branches, then back down at the paper or a book, everything feels right for the moment, which is maybe all we have.
Anne Lamott
Mindfulbalance 