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
Tag: Be fully present
Being useless
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.
Beyond limitations
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
Masks
Everyone has a life that is different from the ‘I’ of daily consciousness, a life that is trying to live through the ‘I’ who is its vessel. This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches; there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self. The soul is like a wild animal; tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.
Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Complaining
Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself….
The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations.
What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy.
The implication is always: this should not be happening;
I don’t want to be here; I don’t want to be doing this; I’m being treated unfairly.
And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
Sunday Quote: Where we are
Our humble way… is to root ourselves –
beneath the thousand dreams and excuses
that keep us from the ground we walk.
Mark Nepo.
