Fear not the pain.
Let its weight fall back into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
Rilke
We are often deeply moved by ruins. We respond to the crumbling wall of an old farmhouse, the rusting hull of a battleship, or the remains of a medieval abbey. These objects move us because they suggest the inevitable victory of time over human ambition. They humble us. They make our own worries seem smaller. They help us to accept decay and mortality as natural parts of life rather than as enemies to be resisted at all costs.
Art can perform a similar function. A painting of a wilting flower, a fading sunset, or an aging face can—if we let it—teach us to accept the inevitable with grace rather than rage. It can help us see that impermanence is not a flaw in existence but its very essence
Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art as Therapy
Meditation is not something apart from life. When you are driving a car or sitting in a bus, when you are chatting aimlessly, when you are walking by yourself in a wood or watching a butterfly being carried by the wind – that is the moment when meditation can take place, if you are aware, if you are attentive, if your mind is not occupied with endless chatter.
J. Krishnamurti
The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it’s sweet, and sometimes it’s bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy.
From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape
We do not search for love because it is absent
it seems to be absent because we search for it
Rupert Spira, Transparent Body, Luminous World.
Our soul – with its insistence on finding the still point from which it keeps rising – carries us through the seasons of our lives. This still point under all that keeps moving waits under every season we can imagine. It is the silent center that keeps us sane. We all have different names for this immovable ground, but I call it spirit.
Each passing year, we are asked to return to the ground of our spirit in order to go on. Each passing year, we are asked to listen like the seed for our crack of light in spring, to listen like the brook for our soft gurgle in summer, to listen like the leaf for our orange face in fall, to listen like the snow for a quiet place where we can powder down and rest
Mark Nepo
Mindfulbalance 