The way to solve the problem isn’t through trying to make everything right and pleasant on the external dimension,
but to develop the right understanding, the right attitude towards ourselves.
Ajahn Sumedho
Tag: heart
Inner and outer life on the first day of Spring
This morning two birds
fell down the side of the maple tree
like a tuft of fire, a wheel of fire
a love knot out of control as they plunged through the air
pressed against each other
and I thought
how I meant to live a quiet life
how I meant to live a life of mildness and meditation
tapping the careful words against each other
and I thought—
as though I were suddenly spinning, like a bar of silver
as though I had shaken my arms and lo! they were wings—
of the Buddha
when he rose from his green garden
when he rose in his powerful ivory body
when he turned to the long dusty road without end
when he covered his hair with ribbons and the petals of flowers
when he opened his hands to the world.
Mary Oliver, Spring
Our overactive minds
Most times that I fret and chafe about an upcoming engagement, someone cancels; most times I dread a coming moment, the moment never comes. It’s not the world that I need to change, but the mayhem that my overactive mind makes of the world. It’s more than capable of seeing a blue car stationary, and constructing out of it a six-act melodrama
Pico Iyer, The Folly of the Weather Forecast
What shapes our mind, our thoughts, our moods
My experience is what I agree to attend to,
Only those items I notice shape my mind.
William James, American psychologist and philosopher.
Every moment is a new opportunity
In Zen, we have a saying that if you haven’t seen somebody for two minutes, don’t assume he or she is the same person. Maybe that person has changed, or maybe conditions have changed. The important thing is to see what I can do now. If you and I are not bound by our past conditioning, we can see things afresh. Then every moment contains a new opportunity.
Bernie Glassman, Instructions to the Cook
A need for the timeless
One of the signs of work that’s debilitating is when you feel constantly besieged by time, when you are constantly trying to fit your work into a schedule. Now there’s no work that is immune to the sense of deadline or of being limited. But if you don’t have a cyclical visitation of the timeless in your endeavours, I’d say that’s a pretty good sign it’s not your conversation, it’s not your work and you should be elsewhere. Or you should move on from something that perhaps once brought that into your life but no longer does. The whole idea of pilgrimage is not necessarily moving on from a particular form of conversation, but finding – and I do think work is a kind of out loud, visible conversation – it’s keeping that conversation real, and in order to do that, finding new forms appropriate to it.
David Whyte
