Not perfect but complete

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A thousand times I have ascertained and
found it to be true:

The affairs of this world are really nothing
into nothing.

Still though, we should dance.

Hafiz

The flow of the breath

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Breath – you invisible poem!

Pure, continuous change

with all that is, flow and counterflow

where rhythmically I come to be.

Each time a wave that occurs just once in a sea I discover I am.

You, innermost of oceans, you, infinitude of space.

How many far places were once within me.

Some winds are like my own child.

When I breathe them now, do they know me again?

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 1

photo Zwiadowca21

As it comes

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I have learned to live each day as it comes,

and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow.

It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.

Dorothy Day, American journalist and Catholic Social activist

photo Audrey

In touch with a source within

duck

One of the aims of meditation practice is to develop a mind that sees, and does not get hooked into events too easily. The “Ten Thousand things” in this quote is a shorthand way of talking about all the experiences –  good and bad – which arise and pass away.  It stands for all of reality, which contains the right mix of experiences for our growth, and with its ebbs and flows is continually rearranging itself.

When the ten thousand things are viewed in their oneness

we return to the origin

and remain where we have always been.

Sosan, Third Zen Patriarch, died 606

A space beneath

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Good or bad, happy or sad,

all thoughts vanish into emptiness

like the imprint of a bird in the sky.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

photo afrikaforce

Inside not beyond

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The most heartbreaking thing is not heartbreak; it’s avoiding heartbreak. Inside the transience of life is the thusness of everything, of the tree with forty crows on it in the winter, the sound of death-metal drums from the kids in the barn, and the feeling of sadness when you lose someone. A lot of suffering is resistance to the life of feeling. If you surrender, you are surrendering to what is really going on. This is just to notice that nothing beyond your life is more important than your life.

John Tarrant, Surprises on the Way