Tag: Be fully present

An overcast day

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Pay close attention to your mean thoughts.
That sourness may be a blessing,
as an overcast day brings rain for the roses
and relief to dry soil.

Don’t look so sourly on your sourness!
It may be it’s carrying what you most deeply need
and want.

What seems to be keeping you from joy
may be what leads you to joy.

Don’t call it a dead branch.
Call it the live, moist root.
Don’t always be waiting to see
what’s behind it.
Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.

Rumi in Coleman Banks, Delicious Laughter: Rambunctious Teaching Stories from the Mathnawi

Pay attention

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I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

Mary Oliver, The Summer Day [extract]

Lifelong search

Karl Duffy1 Comment

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for  its outlines all our lives.   Some  find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town,  parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert.  There are those  born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense  and busy loneliness of the city.  For some, the search is for the  imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a  lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.  We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the  agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

Josephine Hart, Damage

Really see

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Picasso

Listen

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The sounds of streams
are Buddha’s speech.
The coloured mountains
are Buddha’s pure body.

Night brings eighty-four thousand poems of Buddha.

Listen, someday you may awaken.

Su Shi, 1037 – 1101, Chinese calligrapher, essayist and poet.

Now

Karl Duffy2 Comments

There is one simple thing wrong with you – you think you have plenty of time….If you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for?

Why the hesitation to change?

Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan