Tag: balance

How difficulties can be creative…

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Flog og Fjaere 2.JPG

A different way of seeing the challenges in life, and maybe a more helpful way of looking at the slow diversions which life obliges us to take:

Une difficulte est une lumiere. Une difficulte insurmontable est un soleil. Paul Valery

(A difficulty is a light; an insurmountable difficulty is a sun)

We tend to perceive difficulty as disturbance. Ironically, difficulty can be a great friend of creativity… I love these lines from Paul Valery: this is a completely different way of considering the awkward, the uneven, and the difficult. Deep within us, there is a terrible impulse and drive toward perfection. We want everything flattened into one shape. We do not like unexpected shapes… The imagination in its loyalty to possibility often takes the curved path rather than the linear way. Such risk and openness inherit the harvest of creativity, beauty and spirit.

 John O’Donohue Anam Chara

photo kilabs

Surviving or celebrating?

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Ghana women dance (7250869584).jpg

Harley Swift Deer, a Native American teacher, says that each of us has a survival dance and a sacred dance, but the survival dance must come first. Our survival dance, a foundational component of self-reliance, is what we do for a living — our way of supporting ourselves physically and economically. For most people, this means a paid job. Everybody has to have a survival dance. Finding and creating one is our first task upon leaving our parents’ or guardians’ home.

Once you have your survival dance established, you can wander, inwardly and outwardly, searching for clues to your sacred dance, the work you were born to do. This work may have no relation to your job. Your sacred dance sparks your greatest fulfillment and extends your truest service to others. You know you’ve found it when there’s little else you’d rather be doing. Getting paid for it is superfluous. You would gladly pay others, if necessary, for the opportunity. Hence, the importance of self-reliance, not merely the economic kind implied by a survival dance but also of the social, psychological, and spiritual kind. To find your sacred dance, after all, you will need to take significant risks. You might need to move against the grain of your family and friends.  Swift Deer says that once you discover your sacred dance and learn effective ways of embodying it, the world will support you in doing just that.

Bill Plotkin, SoulCraft

 

Sunday Quote: Little needs, much contentment.

Karl Duffy2 Comments

If we have little needs and much contentment,

we experience the wealth of the world around us,

and when we experience that wealth

there’s nothing we need to renounce 

and nothing we need to add to it.

Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel

What to remember in a time of change

Karl Duffy2 Comments

A similar theme, this time from the Christian tradition:

Nothing lasts. No single thing can consume our entire life’s meaning. No single thing can give us total satisfaction. Nothing is worth everything: neither past, nor present nor future. It isn’t true that the loss of any single thing will destroy us. Everything in life has some value and life is full of valuable things, things worth living for, things worth doing, things worth becoming, things worth loving again. It is only a matter of being detached enough from one thing to be open to everything else.

The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us  but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us.

Joan Chittister, After Great Pain: Finding a Way Out

This is how it is 2: Whatever arises must pass away

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Lacquer buddha.jpg

Sometimes I’d go to see old religious sites with ancient temple buildings, designed by architects, beautifully built by skilled craftsmen. In some places they would be cracked. Maybe one of my friends would remark, “Such a shame, isn’t it? It’s cracked. ” I’d say: “If that weren’t the case then there’d be no such thing as the Buddha, there’d be no Dharma. It’s cracked like this because it’s perfectly in line with the Buddha’s teaching.

Ajahn Chah

photo sookie

This is how it is 1: No here, no there, no liking and disliking

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Canne di bambù (Roma 2005).jpg

The 9th Century Zen Master Siubi was asked “What is the secret of Zen”

“Come back when there is no-one around and I shall tell you”

The inquirer returned and Siubi took him to a bamboo-grove, pointed to the bamboos and said 

“See how long these are. See how short these are”

Suddenly the questioner had a flash of awakening. What did he see? He had a revelation of sheer existence. Where there is revelation, explanation becomes superfluous. Curiosity is dissolved in wonder.

John Welwood: Ordinary magic: Everyday life as Spiritual Path