Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.
Mary Oliver, October
photo CSIRO
Tag: Be fully present
A challenge for this Friday
Accept – then act
Whatever the present moment contains,
accept it as if you had chosen it
This will miraculously transform your whole life
Eckhart Tolle
photo MOs810
Don’t hold on
[Our] knowing awareness gets lost when we cling to states of mind, because these are always in motion. We get pulled off balance by emotionally powered thoughts that demand that we follow them, fix them, get rid of them or worry about them. So we have to learn to undo the habit of reaching for, adopting or clinging. You can never satisfy a driven mind. A wise person is someone who can give up the ranting of the self to find a more natural tune; they can see the clamouring and the clutching, the fearing and the grasping, are unnecessary and not worth hosting.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami
Guarded
We often go through our day or our life with our defenses up…
I seemed to hear God saying, “Put down your gun and we’ll talk.”
C.S. Lewis
Paying attention
Friday…a little more space appears…we can perhaps notice the beauty all around us, in the little things, new colours, some time for ourselves:
I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do.
The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me; the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel,
the unutterable muddiness of mud…
GK Chesterton
Making the most of life
Mindful eating at its best, the poet fully taken by the eating of a peach. It can be the same for us today if we give any moment our full awareness:
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
extract, Li-Young Lee, From Blossoms
South Korean Screen painting of the Sun, Moon and Peach Trees
