Remember that at any given moment there are a thousand things you can love.
David Levithan, 1972 – American author and editor.
Remember
Tag: heart
Mindfulness of the body
The key lesson every meditator should take away … is that when the mind is calm, use that calm to investigate the body as impermanent, suffering, and not-self. This is because the roots of all difficulties are attached to this body.
Ajahn Sona
Sunday Quote: At peace
Watch the workings of all of creation [“the ten thousand things”},
but contemplate their return to the source.
All creatures in the universe
return to the point where they began.
Returning to the source is tranquility
because we submit to heavens mandate
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 16
All this falling
As I walk through the woods along the lake, I’m quickened by nature’s palette of subtle and vivid colors. At the same time — as the leaves drop and the dark skeletons of the trees begin to emerge — I’m sobered by the fact that all green, growing, and glorious things must pass away.
And yet, as the years go by, the more I find that these two feelings dance with each other. The fact that all things must die makes me ever more grateful for the beauties of nature and human nature.
If we let that gratitude animate us to care for the natural and human communities, then what falls to the ground around us and among us will seed the flowering of new life.
As Rilke says in this lovely and well-known poem, “…there is Someone, whose hands, infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.”
We are that Someone’s hands. Let’s hold all this falling in ways that will help the earth and its creatures rise…
Parker J. Palmer
Sunday Quote: An Autumn chant
Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā
[“Gone, Gone, Gone beyond, Completely gone to the Other Shore. Oh what an Awakening”]
The final lines of the Heart Sutra considered by some Buddhists the perfection of all wisdom – Pragya Paramita- finding a pace of rest, a stability that is beyond all coming or going.
Insisting and contracting
What is craving? Basically, experientially, it’s contracting onto a wish and getting insistent about it. A highly insistent contracting around something we want. And we can include in that things we don’t want also, because not wanting something is wanting something to be absent. Or wanting something to be different.
So, if we want to suffer less, we need to find where we are getting insistent and contracted around how we would like things to be. So don’t look at the suffering and say: I want that to stop. Look for craving instead…. try to find it, and just leave it at that for now. Just see the craving, and let it be. If we can just learn to do that, that’s a great big lesson.
Henry Shukman, Mountain Cloud Zen Center Blog
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