The effect of life in society is to complicate our existence,
making us forget who we really are,
by causing us to become obsessed
with what we are not
Chuang Tzu, 4th Century BC, Inner Chapters
Tag: balance
That’s the key
The teachings about recognizing egolessness sound quite abstract, but the path quality of that, the magic instruction that we have all received, the golden key is that part of the meditation technique where you recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, “Thinking.” Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather – the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know that.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape
We just don’t know
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions?
For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Sunday Quote: A day of rest
I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal,
as fragmented people make for better consumers.
Kathleen Norris
Being led
Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led — make of that what you will.
Wedndell Berry, Jayber Crow, A Novel
Here and not here
Acknowledging that there is a groundlessness at the heart of the human condition, or an unsatisfactory element to our experience, is part of most spiritual traditions. As Pema Chodron says: “The truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure.…”
Why are we made the way we are made, that to love
Is to want?
Well, you are gone now, and this morning I have walked out
To the back shore,
To the ocean which, even if we think we have measured it,
Has not final measure.
Sometimes you can see the great whales there,
Breaching and playing.
Sometimes the swans linger just long enough
For us to be astonished.
Then they lift their wings, they become again
A part of the untouchable clouds.
Mary Oliver, There you were and it was like spring
