Even on a grey snowy morning like this one…
The mind is luminous, brightly shining, and this is never absent. However, it is sullied by incoming defilements, coloured by the thoughts and emotions that people put upon it. If you were to see the luminous freedom of the mind, you would cultivate it before anything else, keeping it free from all attachments
Anguttara Nikaya, early Buddhist scripture
Whenever we give ourselves to whatever presents itself, instead of grasping and holding it, we flow with it. We do not arrest the flow of reality, we do not try to possess, we do not try to hold back, but we let go, and everything is alive as long as we let it go. When we cut the flower it is no longer alive; when we take water out of the river it is just a bucketful of water, not the flowing river; when we take air and put it in a balloon it is no longer the wind. Everything that flows and is alive has to be taken and given at the same time – taken with a very, very light touch. Here again we are not playing off give against take, but learning to balance the two in a genuine response to living as well as to dying.
David Stendhal Rast osb
Do not seek perfection in a changing world.
Instead perfect your love.
Master Sengstan, Third Zen Patriarch, 7th C AD
The hardest thing I have learned and still struggle with
is that I don’t have to be finished
to be whole
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Change the attitude and perspective that comes from the daily world of time and having some place to go, to one being more steady and collected in the here and now.
The time sense is important to be clear about. Notice how the future feels as a direct experience: when there’s something in the future, there’s tension. This could be either because of impatience to get to a desirable state or an achievement, or it could be worry or dread over what might go wrong. In either case you lose the open ease of being in the present. When you think of the future as a definite reality, you believe in the moods that are embedded in that sense, and in the ideas that they create. Worries start to solidify; flexibility and the capacity to deal with what arises begin to dwindle. But how real is ‘the future’? After all, we might be dead tomorrow! Isn’t it more the case that the present will unfold in line with causes and conditions ? So check the time sense; it’s caused by the moods and energies of the present. The visions and ideas are an illusion.
Take refuge in Awakening.
Direct awareness is only and always here and now; and conditions change around that sense
Ajahn Sucitto
My dear Lucilius, begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
The one who has thus prepared himself, whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind; but those who live for hope alone find that the immediate future always slips from their grasp.
Seneca
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