Sometimes we try too hard, and then life has a way of revealing what we need
The early sun dissolves the mist
that has covered the mountain.
All night I have listened to the wise,
yet failed to learn.
Dimly, darkly, the eternal pines
rise without effort from the vanishing fog.
Xue Tao, c770–832, Chinese poet
We must shape life so
that at some future hour,
facts and dreams meet.
Victor Hugo
Our lives are not beyond this breath there on the chilly glass, but of that breath
and in this life the hands in our mittens are never really empty.
It is all around us, free, this wonderful life: clear jingle of tire chains, the laughter of ice that breaks under our boots. Each hour is a gift to those who take it up.
Ted Kooser, American Pulitzer Prize winning Poet, December
One point that Ajahn Sumedho would stress regularly, is that loving things is not the same as liking them. Having kindness for ourselves or for other beings is not the same as liking everything.
We often come a cropper by trying to make ourselves like everything. This is a completely wrong approach. When we taste something that’s bitter and try to force ourselves to believe it’s sweet this is just falsity, it’s just sugaring things over. It doesn’t work. It just makes the bitter even worse….We’re not trying to like everything, rather we’re recognising that everything belongs. Everything is part of nature: the bitter as well as the sweet, the beautiful as well as the ugly, the cruel as well as the kindly. The heart that recognises that fundamentally everything belongs is what I would describe as being the heart of kindness, the essence of kindness.
Ajahn Amaro, Radical Acceptance
If you could only keep quiet,
– clear of memories and expectations –
you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events.
It is your restlessness that causes chaos.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, 1897 – 1981, Indian non dualist teacher
The season of Advent commences: a period for waiting, for simplifying things and for seeing what is important. To have space for what has not yet come, we need to notice what gets in the way of being still and open.
In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow.
In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.
And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.
Pico Iyer. The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere
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