Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed – that is human. When you are born, where do you come from? When you die, where do you go? Life is like a floating cloud which appears. Death is like a floating cloud which disappears. The floating cloud itself originally does not exist. Life and death, coming and going, are also like that.
But there is one thing which always remains clear. It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.
Seungsahn Haengwon, 1927 – 2004, Korean Zen Master
Remember that at any given moment there are a thousand things you can love.
David Levithan, 1972 – American author and editor.
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
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
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
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.
Mindfulbalance 