Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, “The flag moves.” The other said, “The wind moves.” They argued back and forth but could not agree. Hui-neng, said: “Gentlemen! It is not the flag that moves. It is not the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves.” The two monks were struck with awe.
Chinese master Hui-neng (638-713), the Sixth Ch’an Patriarch is considered by some to be the true father of Zen.
photo matt brown
Episcopal Priest Robert Farrer Capon warns “We spend a long time wishing we were elsewhere and otherwise“. We are like the character in the movie Postcards from the Edge who sends a card home from vacation, “Having a wonderful time. Wish I were here”
Frederic Brussat, Spiritual Literacy
photo coillte.ie
Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy
— to be someone who is brisk about his food and his work.
Søren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855, Danish Philosopher
photo kanko
On the 150th anniversary of his birth:
We can make our minds so like still water
that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images,
and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life, because of our quiet.
W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight, Faerie and Folklore
photo miguel virkkunen carvalho
Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness — mine, yours, ours — need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.
Parker Palmer
Meanwhile, here we are, missing the fullness of the present moment, which is where the soul resides. It’s not like you have to go someplace else to get it. So the challenge here is, Can we live this moment fully? When you ask a group of people to spend five minutes watching their own breaths moving in and out of their bodies, just as an experiment, they discover that their minds are like bubbling vats, and it’s not so easy to stay on the breath. The mind has a life of its own. It carries you away. Over a lifetime, you may wind up in the situation where you are never actually where you find yourself. You’re always someplace else, lost, in your head, and therefore in a kind of dysfunctional or nonoptimal state. Why dysfunctional? Because the only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets. You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.The past in gone, and I don’t know what’s coming in the future. It’s obvious that if I want my life to be whole, to resonate with feeling and integrity and value and health, there’s only one way I can influence the future: by owning the present.
Jon Kabat Zinn
photo kevin higgins
