A post from an Irish author, to mark St Patrick’s Day
I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding
John O’Donohue
photo of Kells Bridge over the Kings River by Mike Searle
Tag: heart
Life’s journey
I do not understand the mystery of grace –
only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies
A kind of frontier
It is possible to attain a state where we are free from suffering. We free ourselves from suffering by being fully in the conversation, rather than something static, having a conversation at every turn. As an individual, I must learn to live at a kind of frontier between what I think is me and what I think is not me, so that my identify is more of a meeting place; an edge between past and present rather than an island around which the events of life swirl and move on…Even grief and loss, if felt in a timeless way, can be free from disconnection or suffering.
David Whyte, The Three Marriages
photo svickova
As they are
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
photo paul stocker
Just doing our best
When we do the best that we can,
we never know what miracle is wrought in our life,
or in the life of another.
Helen Keller
photo alex proimos
Not everything is grasped by thinking
After learning from Dogen and the Japanese Zen tradition yesterday, today we can learn from Bodhidharma, (6th Century), the larger-than-life transmitter of Chan Buddhism to China, who similarly reminds us that direct knowing is often richer than understanding reality just by thinking.
If you use your (thinking) mind to study reality,
You won’t understand either your mind or reality.
If you study reality without using your mind
You’ll understand both.
photo oxfordian kissuth
