We drift in and out of knowing our aliveness. Pain, worry, fear, and loss can muffle and confuse us. But ……aliveness is not a judge in a talent show. Aliveness shows itself in response to wholeheartedness, when we can say yes to life, and work with what we’re given, and stay in relationship — to everything.
Mark Nepo, Everyone has a gift
O human, see then the human being rightly:
the human being has heaven and earth and the whole of creation in itself, and yet is a complete form,
and in it everything is already present, though hidden.
Hidlegard of Bingen
Universal Mind is like a great ocean,
its surface ruffled by waves and surges
but its depths remaining forever unmoved.
The Lankavatara Scripture, c.350 AD
It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky,
between voyager and sea.
Between reality and the workings of the heart.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on The Shore
It takes time and patient practice to develop qualities that make for a lasting effect. This idea is not easy to hold on to in a society that prizes immediate results. Emptying the mind of the need to be noticed, or thought as special, allows us to just be ourselves in a simple way:
The sage Chuang-Tzu was walking with a disciple on a hilltop. They saw a crooked, ancient tree without a single straight branch. The disciple said the tree is useless, nothing from it can be used. Chuang-Tzu replied: That’s the reason it is ancient. Everyone seems to know how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless.
Souls get big from opening out beyond the limitations of human knowledge and control.
Everyone is called to be a mystic of some sort, and being open to mystery and myth, the intuitive and the non-rational, to art and ritual, to nature and animals, to absurd ideas and outrageous fantasies gives the soul room to fashion a lovable and thoughtful human being. However simple your life, however ordinary and retiring, you can have a mega-soul, a vast source of vitality, and the capacity for pain and failure as well. You can be noble in your simplicity and deep and wide in your ability to contain life.
Thomas Moore
Mindfulbalance 