The Ancient Desert Fathers, when they were disconsolate and without hope, would repeat one word, over and over, as a kind of soothing mantra.
And the word wasn’t “Jesus” or “God” or “Love.”
The word was “Today.” It kept them where they needed to be.
Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart
Live as if you were living a second time,
and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
Victor Frankl
The Feast of All Saints
Our struggles are not separate from the luminous vastness within each of us.
We don’t get rid of struggle to discover this open space; nor does its discovery necessarily rid us of our struggles.
The riddle of the obstacle is solved not by pushing it away or by holding on to it, but by meeting it with silence and by discovering in this meeting that sacred ground, which upholds both joy and sorrow, both struggle and freedom from struggle.
When we realize this, we will struggle less with our struggles, and we will have solved by our own silence the riddles that guard the doorway into the silent land.
Martin Laird, Into a Silent Land
Ancient knowledge from the Celtic calendar which saw tonight as the threshold between the light and dark times of the year, when the earth turns inward. Sometimes wisdom doesn’t have to be learned so much as reawakened. We scroll endlessly, but rarely return to stillness to rediscover the thresholds where mystery begins.
Fashioned from clay, we carry the memory of the earth. Ancient, forgotten things stir within our hearts, memories from the time before the mind was born. Within us are depths that keep watch. These are depths that no words can trawl or light unriddle.
Our neon times have neglected and evaded the depth-kingdoms of interiority in favor of the ghost realms of cyberspace. We have unlearned the patience and attention of lingering at the thresholds where the unknown awaits us. We have become haunted pilgrims addicted to distraction and driven by the speed and colour of images.
John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
Unless there is a still center in the middle of the storm,
unless individuals in the midst of all their activities
preserve a secret room in the hearts
where they sit alone before God,
unless we do this, we will lose all sense
of direction and be torn to pieces.
anonymous monk in the Egyptian desert
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup; you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle; you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee, based on the Pierre Berton Interview 1971.
Mindfulbalance 