The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities
will find no rest.
Rumi, That lives in Us
Tag: Be fully present
Sunday Quote: Miracles
A miracle is often the willingness to see the common
in an uncommon way.
Noah benShea
A psalm on acceptance
Even in the midst of great pain, Lord,
I praise you for that which is.
I will not refuse this grief
or close myself to this anguish.
Let shallow men pray for ease:
“Comfort us; shield us from sorrow.”
I pray for whatever you send me,
and I ask to receive it as your gift.
You have put a joy in my heart
greater than all the world’s riches.
I lie down trusting the darkness,
for I know that even now you are here.
Psalm 4, from Stephen Mitchell, A Book of Psalms: Selected and Adapted from the Hebrew.
Dont waste it
Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.
I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright….Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock – more than a maple – a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
An invitation to fullness
There is really no place to go in this moment. We are already here. Can we be here fully?
There really is nothing to do. Can we let go into non-doing, into pure being? There really is nothing to attain, no special “state” or “feeling” because whatever you are experiencing in this moment is already special, already extraordinary, by virtue of the fact that it is being experienced.
The paradox of this invitation is that everything you might wish for is already here.
And the only important thing is – to be the knowing that awareness already is.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners
Sunday Quote: In the moment
I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke, American poet, 1908 – 1963, The Waking
photo Jlla00
