Tag: heart

Clean your windows

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When you are upset, your window is blurred. And…you’re going to straighten out all the buildings just because your window is blurred with the rain?

Could we clean our windows first?

We see people not as they are, but as we are. And it’s amazing how in the beginning we saw people as rude; then when we change, we see frightened people. They are so scared that they’re driven to hostility. Then you are understanding, you are compassionate, whereas before you’d react with anger, with hate.

Anthony De Mello, sj.

Still we stumble

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A Full moon this evening.

A single moon
Bright and clear in an unclouded sky:
Yet still we stumble
In the world’s darkness.
Have a good look:
stop the breath, peel off the skin,
and everybody ends up looking the same.
No matter how long you live,
the result is not altered.
Who will not end up as a skeleton?

Cast off the notion that “I
exist.” …. Entrust yourself to the windblown
clouds, and do not wish to live forever

Ikkyū, 1394 – 1481, Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet, in John Stevens, Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu

Today

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May you take time to celebrate
the quiet miracles that seek no attention.

May you experience each day
as a sacred gift
woven around the heart of wonder.

John O’Donohue, Benedictus

Beyond

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It is not a matter of looking for happiness

or trying to avoid suffering

but of going to the place beyond happiness or suffering

Ajahn Chah

Relax the fist

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I hope you can live your life with slightly less firmly clenched fists and slightly more open hands. Slightly less control. Slightly more trust. Slightly less I need to know everything beforehand. Slightly more take life as it comes. It does all of us a world of good. Life doesn’t have to be lived with constant anxiety about things not turning out the way we want. We don’t have to make ourselves smaller than we are. We have a choice. Do we want to grab life by he throat or do we want to embrace it?

Relax that fist as often as you can.

Bjorn Natthiko Lindeblad, I May be Wrong, and other wisdoms from life as a Forest Monk.

Being the moon

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Everyone wants to be the sun

to brighten someone’s life,

but why not the moon,

to shine on someone’s darkest hour?

Don Jose Ruiz