Tag: Be fully present

It’s another Monday

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The mind is constantly making judgments about ourselves, others, or how this day is going to be. Better to stick with the moment-to-moment experience, and avoid coming to conclusions before they happen.

Our daily world is commonly held in terms of non-specific generalizations, like its ‘another Monday,’ or, ‘a typical man’, or ,‘I dread meeting Janice, she’s always like this,’ or ‘I’m hopeless.’ In fact ……. any sense of a lasting entity or state of being is an act of generalization. It’s a useful convention, but one that allows the mind’s neuroses and corruptions to be projected onto the here and now.

Ajahn Sucitto, The Low Point

Sunday Quote: A deep yearning

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Advent starts today, the period of looking forward to Christmas, but more deeply, it is a good season to look at desire and longing. There is a type of hole at the heart of human subjectivity, which gives rise to a perpetual cause of desire. In traditions,  both East and West,  it is understood that this desire, this restlessness or emptiness, will never go away. Indeed, it the this emptiness which gives rise to a longing that takes us beyond ourselves.  Advertisers try to lure us into the belief that we can make this longing go away, encouraging us to think that once we we get this thing or feeling we will be at rest.  

Dear soul, if you were not friends
with the vast nothing inside,
why would you always be casting your net
into it, and waiting so patiently?

Rumi

A new year

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The last day of the year in the Christian liturgical calendar. Advent and the preparation for Christmas starts tomorrow:

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter

The paradox of human life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings.

If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.   

Parker Palmer

In your deepest self

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live,

or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair,

but ask me what I am living for, in detail,

ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

Thomas Merton, My argument with the Gestapo

Seasons are natural

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As yesterday’s post reminded us, things are always changing in life, just as nature has its seasons:

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep in your heart the miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Kahil Gibran The Prophet