Modern society prizes intelligence, achievements or efficiency…
What wisdom can you find
that is greater than kindness?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Quelle sagesse trouverez-vous supérieure à la bonté?
Tag: Be fully present
Where are you going?
We frequently get caught up in work, and identify with the pressing demands there, which pull us along and create a sense of great importance.
There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man standing alongside the road, shouts, “Where are you going?” and the first man replies, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don’t know where we are going, and we can’t stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war within ourselves…We have to learn the art of stopping – stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us.
Thích Nhât Hanh, The Heart of the Buddhas Teaching
The place from which all other parts are named
It is always a trauma for the human psyche when those elements it has over-invested itself in at the periphery of life are withdrawn, and the spring-like world of growth and opportunity seems to close down, as if the old currencies have become worthless while we as yet do not know how to value or harvest the following season. But this form of trauma has also been seen by many of our great religious, contemplative and artistic traditions as an invitation back to another kind of valuation, a return to a more internal focus, an opportunity to revive an old friendship with the place from which all the peripheries are recognized, priced and named. This internal, alchemical, almost catalytic core of identity-making and decision-making has long been associated with the soul of an individual; the part of us attempting to belong to the world in the biggest way it can; the part that witnesses our outer actions, stirs our conscience and quite often seems to be at odds with those other parts of us trying to game the system at the periphery.
David Whyte
Like a mirror
The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror;
it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing;
it receives, but does not keep.
Chuang-tzu, 4th Century BC
One hour at a time
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
Mary Oliver, Snow Geese
One world at a time
Satisfaction is very close and simple: the strange happiness of completely joining with whatever we are doing in that moment… When the writer Thoreau was on his deathbed, a visitor asked him – “from where you lie, so close to the brink of the dark river, can you say how the opposite shore looks to you?”
It is said that he replied gently, “One world at a time”
Susan Murphy, Upside Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the ordinary
