Monday: a new day

This morning, the sun rose without fanfare, yet it claimed the sky.

The light touches everything – the dew, the stone, the anxious heart – and whispers: You are seen. You are held. 

It’s a beautiful day not because it’s perfect, but because within its hours lies the relentless, gentle persistence of grace.

Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community

Sunday Quote: to the fullest

To those who will come after, I say

Life is not for waiting.

Rumi, Gnostic Donkeys (2)

just listen

I don’t know anything about consciousness.

I just try to teach my students to hear the birds sing.

Shunryu Suzuki.

Acting wisely

The Gita emphasises a state of ‘action in inaction’ (naishkarmya karma)

We exhaust ourselves trying to control outcomes.

The [Bhagavad] Gita reminds us: surrender the illusion of control.

Do your duty impeccably, but let go of how things should turn out.

This is the secret of wise action


Stephen Cope,  The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker’s Guide to Extraordinary Living

Always here

Peace isn’t a thought or a feeling.

It’s the ground of being that’s always here

when you stop clinging to the noise in your head.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of Silence

Like a mother

Almost no one is exempt from trauma. While some people have it in a more pronounced way than others, the unpredictable and unstable nature of things makes life inherently traumatic.

What the Buddha revealed through his dreams was that, true as this may be, the mind, by its very nature, is capable of holding trauma much the way a mother naturally relates to a baby.

One does not have to be helpless and fearful, not does one have to be hostile and self-reverential. the mind knows intuitively how to find a middle path. Its implicit relational capacity is hardwired

Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life