Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.
Anton Chekhov
Appreciate
Tag: Be fully present
Seeking real treasure
I have just three things to teach
Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures:
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 67
A rush to consume
In the second Noble Truth, the Buddha identified taṇhā – the urge to become, to have or consume more – as a main cause of our subtle discontent and ongoing stress. However, this underlying drive to consume can be observed and then its power diminishes. This is one meaning of “waking up”: becoming free by cutting off the momentum towards unhappiness at its source
If you sleep, restless craving (taṇhā) grows in you like a vine in the forest. Like a monkey in the forest you jump from tree to tree, never finding the fruit – from life to life, never finding peace. If you are filled with this restless craving, your sorrows will multiply like the grass growing after rain. But if you let craving go, your sorrows fall from you like drops of water from a lotus flower. This is good advice and it is for everyone: as the grass is cleared for fresh planting, let go of grasping lest death after death crush you as a river crushes helpless reeds. For if the roots hold firm, the felled tree grows up again. And if restless craving is not uprooted, sorrows will grow again in you.
Dhammapada
Sunday Quote: Start over
You will be shown the way forward when your wagon is overturned
Babylonian Proverb
Moments in themselves
Psychologist Steve Taylor recalls watching tourists in the British Museum in London who weren’t really looking at the Rosetta Stone…on display in front of them , so much as preparing to look at it later, by recording images and videos on their phones. So intently were they focusing on using their time for a future benefit – for the ability to revisit or share the experience later on – that they were barely experiencing the exhibition itself at all. Of course, grumbling about young peoples smartphone habits is a favourite pastime of middle-aged curmudgeons like Taylor and me. But his deeper point is that we are all frequently guilty of something similar. We treat everything we’re doing – life itself in other words – as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.
from the always interesting Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to LIve it
Like a little fish
There is a Hindu story about a little fish who went to the Queen of fishes to ask a question. She asked “I have heard of the Great Ocean; mighty and powerful, sustaining all who dwell therein, universally present, yet deep and fathomless. Where is this Great Ocean, and how do I find it?” The Queen replied, “The Great Ocean is everywhere, all around you, within and without. It is sustaining you even now. You exist within it and because of it, and need only accept yourself as you are to know it fully.”
We, like the little fish, exist within enlightenment all the time, unaware of its workings.
There is only one thing to do when we realize we cannot swallow the sea; relax, let go, and simply be one with it. How enjoyable that is! Our relationship to it changes, and it becomes much more personal.
Kyogen Carlson, 1982-2014, Zen Roots
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