Tag: heart

An overcast day

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Pay close attention to your mean thoughts.
That sourness may be a blessing,
as an overcast day brings rain for the roses
and relief to dry soil.

Don’t look so sourly on your sourness!
It may be it’s carrying what you most deeply need
and want.

What seems to be keeping you from joy
may be what leads you to joy.

Don’t call it a dead branch.
Call it the live, moist root.
Don’t always be waiting to see
what’s behind it.
Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.

Rumi in Coleman Banks, Delicious Laughter: Rambunctious Teaching Stories from the Mathnawi

Lifelong search

Karl Duffy1 Comment

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for  its outlines all our lives.   Some  find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town,  parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert.  There are those  born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense  and busy loneliness of the city.  For some, the search is for the  imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a  lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.  We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the  agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

Josephine Hart, Damage

Not adding more

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Not adding to our inevitable difficulties by lamenting, resisting, feeling sorry for ourselves, or making them into the story of our lives. One of the Buddhas most useful teachings: how we speak to ourselves about our challenges reduces our suffering.

Now a well-instructed person, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. As they are touched by that painful feeling, they are not resistant. No resistance-obsession with regard to that painful feeling consumes them.

Just as if they were to shoot a person with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot them with another one, so that they would feel the pain of only one arrow. In the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the well-instructed person does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. They feels one pain: physical, but not mental

Their accepting or rejecting are scattered, gone to their end, do not exist. Knowing the dustless, sorrowless state, they discern rightly, are beyond becoming, have gone to the Further Shore.

The Buddha, The Sallatha Sutta

A solid center

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Many have gone mad looking for a solid center,
but there is none.

We think of centering as only a continual narrowing
of focus until we touch the pearl
but in practice it is often a continual expansion
of focus until we become the ocean.

Our center is vast space, boundless awareness
indistinguishable from unconditional love.

Stephen Levine

Being aware

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How do we accurately evaluate our options and make purposeful decisions when we are so powerfully influenced by our past? Our capacity to be here, now, is always highly problematic.

Holding on to consciousness when history floods us is one of the most difficult things we ever do. And achieving it now is no guarantee that we can do the same tomorrow. Only the sustained effort to remain conscious simultaneously of our own unique journey and the earlier, blocking paradigm, brings the possibility of mature choice.

James Hollis, The Eden Project

Resting kindly

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Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world, that we did not make, that has no price?

Where is our sanity but there?

Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world?

Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace