Hold tight to what is most yourself, Don’t squander it
Don’t let your life be governed by what disturbs you.
Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri , c. 973-1058, Arab philosopher, poet, and writer.
Tag: heart
True freedom is related to absolute trust
It is hard to find better guidance than this. Knowing it deep down would be so nice: to be without anxiety about my imperfections or messy reality or about what is not fully achieved in my life:
One thing, all things, they move and intermingle without distinction.
To live in this realization
is to be without anxiety about imperfection.
The mind of absolute trust is beyond all thought, all striving,
is perfectly at peace, for in it there is no yesterday, no today, no tomorrow.
Seng T’san, 7th Century Zen Patriarch, Hsin Hsin Ming
Sunday Quote: rest
Take rest;
a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop
Da requiem; requietus ager bene credita reddit
Ovid
A dash of foolishness
Maybe because it’s the end of the working week, or people starting on holidays, or simply because its July….. but this post follows the same theme as other Fridays in this month: Let’s keep a capacity for play and for non-doing in our lives..
Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation
in which discipline and order
are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
May Sarton
with thanks to Ben Naga for this lovely quote
and for being one of the longest and most faithful followers of this blog.
Kindness
When I was young, I admired clever people.
Now that I am old, I admire kind people
Abraham Joshua Heschel
No perfect way
Two quotes for today from the great Suzuki Roshi.
Life – or work – can contains elements of mess or chaos and we often approach them with a belief that a resolution can be, or should be arrived at. However, in reality, most of the time, it is rather a question of holding the irresolution or the problem in a new awareness.
Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.
There is no way set up for us. Moment after moment we have to find our own way.
Some idea of perfection, or some perfect way which is set up by someone else, is not the true way for us. Each one of us must make his own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way.
Shunryū Suzuki Roshi, 1904 – 1971
