Translation vary , but in our modern day, conversatio morum suorum generally means conversion of manners, a continuing and unsparing assessment and reassessment of one’s self and what is most important and valuable in life. In essence the individual must continually ask: What is worth living for in this place at this time? And having asked, one must then seek to act in accordance with the answer discerned
Paul Wilkes
Stars and blossoming fruit trees:
Utter permanence and extreme fragility
give an equal sense of eternity.
Simone Weil
photo il conte di luna
We might think of the mind as being like clear, open space. All kinds of things arise there, but the space is not affected….In meditation and in our lives, it is not so important what particular experience arises. What’s important is how we relate to it. By learning to relate well with whatever arises, we open to the full range of human experience, to what the Taoists call “the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows”.
Joseph Goldstein, A Heart Full of Peace
photo chitrapa
The attempt to look at your attitude — what you are feeling and thinking and the frame that holds it –
and then your attitude to your attitude,
is one of the routes to freedom
John Tarrant, In the Wild Places
Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquility of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. The silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real.
Thomas Merton
What is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week doesn’t mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.
Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily
photo:guido gerding
