
Only one thing made him happy
and now that it was gone
everything made him happy.
Leonard Cohen

Only one thing made him happy
and now that it was gone
everything made him happy.
Leonard Cohen

Non-doing has nothing to do with being indolent or passive. Quite the contrary. It takes great courage and energy to cultivate non-doing, both in stillness and in activity. Nor is it easy to make a special time for non-doing and to keep at it in the face of everything in our lives which needs to be done.
Jon Kabat Zinn

The tree on the mountain height is its own enemy.
The grease that feeds the light devours itself.
The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down! The lacquer tree is profitable: they maim it.
Every man knows how useful it is to be useful.
No one seems to know How useful it is to be useless.
Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu

Once or twice a year the abbot at the San Francisco Zen Center, Tenshin Reb Anderson, comes to speak with the hospice volunteers.
One night he gave a talk that included the best advice I’ve ever heard on caregiving.
He said simply, “Stay close and do nothing.”
That’s how we try to practice at Zen Hospice Project.
We stay close and do nothing. We sit still and listen to the stories.
Frank Ostaseski

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion.
What you perceive as precious is not time
but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed.
The more you are focused on time – past and future – the more you miss the Now,
the most precious thing
there is.
Eckhart Tolle

If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life,
your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
Rabindranath Tagore