Tag: growth

Aligning with the truth

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Rilke urges us: “want the change. Be inspired by the flame where everything shines as it disappears”

Exquisite image! Why does he exhort us to want the change? Because change is the way it is. We harbor notions of what is good for us and what is not, and try to organize and strategize accordingly. Yet life does what it does without our concern for our preferences, so Rilke is urging us to look beyond the parade of circumstances and events to the fundamental fact of change itself. In wanting the change, we are aligning ourselves with truth, with what is already happening. 

Roger Housden, Dropping the Struggle: Seven ways to love the life you have 

Sunday Quote: This year….

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A New Years motto….
We are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
William Blake, The Little Black Boy

Starting over

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Thoughts evoke emotions, tensions, excitement and stress, and can bring on exhaustion and sickness. Awareness reveals this simply to be so. Awareness is freedom from wanting to improve oneself or to put oneself down. It … opens one up to whatever else is happening this instant: breathing, a bird singing, a motor humming, the wind blowing, thoughts moving, the body tensing and relaxing…

Toni Packer

Striving

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One must bear in mind that there is a considerable difference between perfection and completeness….

The individual may strive after perfection,

but must suffer from the opposite of his [or her] intentions for the sake of ….. completeness.

Jung

Hold what is asked

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Windowsills evenly welcome both heat and cold.

Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.

Doors are not equivocal,  floorboards do not hesitate or startle.

Impatience does not stir the curtains,

a bed is neither irritable nor rapacious.

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room

we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,

pointing to hinge and plaster and wood —

          You are matter, as they are.

          See how perfectly it can be done.

          Hold, one day more, what is asked.      

Jane Hirshfield,  A Room

All human experience as a privilege

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The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction, No. 198