Tag: Be fully present

Need to breathe

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world.

But you need to breathe.

And you need to be.


Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

The eight worldly winds

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Praise and blame,

gain and loss,

fame and disrepute,

pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind.

To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.

The Buddha

Everything is miraculous

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The great lesson from the true mystics, from the zen monks, from the humanistic and transpersonal psychologists, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s own back yard. This lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.

Abraham Maslow

Cherish being alive

Karl Duffy9 Comments

Got news yesterday of the sudden death of an old friend, who I had not seen in over 18 months due to pandemic restrictions. It made me think of the choices we have as to where we invest our energy and our thoughts. Life can pass us by, and we waste a lot of it rehashing our familiar litany of fears, tired old stories and self-doubts.

In Zen temples there is a small wooden board called a “han” that is struck with a mallet to signal that it is time for some part of the daily routine. It might have the words “Shoji jidai” written on it in ink. Have you ever seen this? The words mean “life is full of fortune and misfortune, but cherish being alive, every single day. Life will pass you by“

Come now, open your eyes.

What kind of day should we make today?

Shunmyo Masumo, Zen: The Art of Simple Living

Movement

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Restrictions have eased and some travel can finally resume, even if for work. Outward movement allows us to observe inner, ongoing, movement of the mind which is always wanting, and trying to fix life the way we would like to find it. Familiar places and yet changed. We like to know where we are going, but physical journeys can be planned, the inner journey less so.

Whales follow
the whale-roads.
Geese, roads of magnetized air.

Yet how often
the heart
that set out for Peru
arrives in China,

Steering hard.
consulting the charts
the whole journey.

Jane Hirshfield, China

Accepting the grace

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The place where you are right now
God circled on a map for you.

Our Beloved has bowed there knowing
you were coming.

I could tell you a priceless secret about
your real worth dear pilgrim.
Any unkindness to yourself,
any confusion about others,
will keep one
from accepting the grace, the love!

Hafiz, Persian Sufi poet