The meaning of life is just to be alive.
It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.
And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic
as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
Alan Watts.
photo asio otus
Tag: balance
Saturday: Moments which contain everything
Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.
Mary Oliver, October
photo CSIRO
Don’t hold on
[Our] knowing awareness gets lost when we cling to states of mind, because these are always in motion. We get pulled off balance by emotionally powered thoughts that demand that we follow them, fix them, get rid of them or worry about them. So we have to learn to undo the habit of reaching for, adopting or clinging. You can never satisfy a driven mind. A wise person is someone who can give up the ranting of the self to find a more natural tune; they can see the clamouring and the clutching, the fearing and the grasping, are unnecessary and not worth hosting.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami
Guarded
We often go through our day or our life with our defenses up…
I seemed to hear God saying, “Put down your gun and we’ll talk.”
C.S. Lewis
Principles for today
I follow four principles:
Face it,
Accept it,
Deal with it,
Then let it go.
Sheng Yen, 1930 – 2009, Chinese Buddhist monk
Paying attention
Friday…a little more space appears…we can perhaps notice the beauty all around us, in the little things, new colours, some time for ourselves:
I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do.
The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me; the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel,
the unutterable muddiness of mud…
GK Chesterton
