I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do
was to show up for my life
and not be ashamed.
Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year
Show up
Tag: Be fully present
Enjoy this day
We spend so much of our lives inhabiting a fictitious future or nostalgically indulging in memories and reminiscences that we fail to notice this extraordinary thing that is happening to us right now. It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.
Stephen Bachelor, in an interview with Wes Nisker, Inquiring Mind
How to keep our calm
Wonder exists in experiencing whatever manifests before you,
and practice must go beyond the present time.
Adapt to conditions and merge with awakening,
then you will not be obstructed by the many tiny motes of dust.
Hongzhi, 1091-1157, Chan Master
Sunday quote: things are complete
Nothing we see or hear is perfect
But right there in the imperfection
is perfect reality
Shunryu Suzuki roshi
A larger perspective
Think about going to the movies. Within seconds, we’re captured by the display on the screen. If it’s a happy movie, we laugh; if it’s a sad movie, we cry. If that’s all that we’re aware of, we don’t really have much choice.
However, if we were to take that same movie and project it on a screen in the middle of an open field in broad daylight, we would be much less likely to get captured. If there’s a big explosion or a love scene, perhaps we’ll pay attention for a little bit, but then our attention will get drawn elsewhere. We see dogs playing, we feel the grass beneath our feet, we hear a plane going overhead. Everything in the environment is so much more real, vast, and vivid than what’s on the movie screen that we don’t get so fascinated by it as easily. The movie is still there, but we’re not bound by it. Our attention is free to roam beyond the film’s storyline, because the context has become so much bigger than the dark theatre.
From this point of view, we can consider that freedom may not actually come from improving the story that’s playing on the screen. In fact, it might come from placing whatever that story is, in all of its complexity, in a larger environment of awareness. Perhaps we don’t have to improve the story we tell about ourselves, about life, in order to experience freedom.
Bruce Tift, Already Free
How you stand
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own call. After that sound goes away, wait.…
How you stand here is important. How you listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.
William Stafford, Being a Person
Mindfulbalance 