It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.
Ram Dass
Tag: growth
We just don’t know
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions?
For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Each moment is a new moment
Abba Moses asked Abba Sylvanus, ‘Can a person lay a new foundation every day?’
The old man said,
‘If they work hard, they can lay a new foundation at every moment.‘
From the sayings of the Desert Fathers. Abba Moses lived 330 – 405 AD
Something is always far away.
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it, rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire……. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Of and from
Our modern Western culture only recognizes the first of these, freedom of desires. It then worships such a freedom by enshrining it at the forefront of national constitutions and bills of human rights. One can say that the underlying creed of most Western democracies is to protect their people’s freedom to realize their desires, as far as this is possible. It is remarkable that in such countries people do not feel very free. The second kind of freedom, freedom from desires, is celebrated only in some religious communities. It celebrates contentment, peace that is free from desires.
Ajahn Brahm, Opening the Door of Your Heart
Getting lost
The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. As far as the animals are concerned, the suburbs are an abandoned landscape, and so they roam with confidence. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to getting Lost
Mindfulbalance 