Tag: heart

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

Clean your windows

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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