We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
Suffering is a sign that you’re out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.
Anthony De Mello
Our original nature is like clear water. Born again into a world of wildly changing forms, though having no essential form of our own, we take on the shapes of the containers we are poured into. We become sons or daughters and are told to think of ourselves in that manner. Acculturated, we bend to the curves of that arbitrary modality. Slowly we freeze into that shape. The straighter and harder the edge the more we are praised as being someone of merit….
But water is water. Melting, it remembers; evaporating, it ascends. When you let go of control of the universe, when you let go of everything, only the truth remains. Your actions come out of the present. There is no force. Fully present. Able to respond, not out of personal desire, but out of a sense of the appropriateness of things. You respond from the flow itself, or perhaps better stated, the flow responds to itself. Letting go of the little mind, of your suffering, is simpler than you think, though it’s the hardest work you will ever do.
Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening
If you free yourself from the comparing and jealous mind, your creativity opens up endlessly. Just as water springs from a fountain, creativity springs from every moment. You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you are in. You must own the environment, the phenomenal world around you. You must be able to freely move in and out of your mind. This is being free. That is my belief.
Jeong Kwan, Buddhist nun and chef of Korean cuisine
A small green island where one white cow lives alone,
a meadow of an island.
The cow grazes till nightfall, full and fat,
but during the night she panics
and grows thin as a single hair. “What shall I eat
tomorrow? There’s nothing left!”
By dawn, the grass has grown up again, waist-high.
The cow starts eating and by dark the meadow is clipped short.
She’s full of strength and energy, but she panics
in the dark as before, and grows abnormally thin overnight.
The cow does this over and over, and this is all she does.
She never thinks, “This meadow has never failed
to grow back. Why should I be afraid every night that it won’t?”
The cow is the soul. The island field is this world where
that grows lean with fear and fat with blessing.
Lean or fat.
White cow, don’t make yourself miserable
with what is to come, or not to come.
Rumi
To know what you’re going to draw,
you have to begin drawing.
Picasso
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