Non est vivere, sed valere vita est
Life is not just a matter of being alive, but living well
Martial, Roman Poet, c 40 – 102 AD, Epigrams Book VI, 70:15)
Sunday Quote: Wholeness
Tag: heart
Our chance selves
For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance.
We ride the wave and are
the wave.
And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.
William Stafford
Restless ambition
or, in Ireland’s case these days, a lot of rain….
Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.
Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?
For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.
And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,
I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.
Mary Oliver, Black Oaks
Overthinking
It is imperative to cut off the mind road.
If you do not cut off the mind road, you will be a ghost, clinging to the grass.
Wu Men Hui-k’ai,, 1183–1260, Chinese Chán master
Don’t give your power away
I think of the past twenty years,
when I used to walk home quietly
from Kuo-ch’ing,
All the people in the Kuo-ch’ing monastery –
would say, “Hanshan is an idiot.”
“Am I really an idiot:” I reflected.
But my reflections failed to solve the question:
for I myself do not know who the self is,
So how can others know who I am?
Hanshan, 9th century, Chinese Buddhist/Taoist poet
Sunday Quote: A light in the heart
No striving, no grasping at this or that, no entertaining any self-involved stories whatsoever.
Instead, attention pivots toward a light in the heart in which the ‘field of boundless emptiness’ is revealed.
All questions and doubts are put to rest.
Hongzhi Zhengjue, 1091–1157, Chinese Chan Buddhist monk
