“No-thought” does not mean cutting off thinking – it means there is no fixation with regard to the free flow of our thinking. We don’t need to reify or solidify what we experience into my thoughts, my feelings. If self-grasping is present, then thoughts don’t flow. When we suffer, we are caught in the middle of the stories that we’re fabricating, and, in this way, we prolong our suffering.
Guo Gu, Silent Illumination
Set wide the window
Let me drink the day
Edith Wharton
The first of May marks the start of Summer in the old Celtic way of dividing the seasons
The heart’s seasons seldom coincide with the calendar. Who among us has not been made desolate beyond all words upon some golden day when the little creatures of the air and meadow were life incarnate, from sheer joy of living? Who among us has not come home, singing, when the streets were almost impassable with snow, or met a friend with a happy, smiling face, in the midst of a pouring rain?
The soul, too, has its own hours of Winter and Spring.
Myrtle Reed 1874 – 1911, American author, poet, journalist, and philanthropist.
If we live everything,
life will be faithful to us.
John O’Donohue
The monk who bakes bread
no longer believes in the measure-for-measure God of the recipe books,
has little faith, if any, in the predestined endings set forth by timers,
the finely sifted claims to inerrancy held by cups and spoons.
Blended to life, call his a leavened devotion to resurrection
appearing from within each cracked tomb of grain,
the hunger that presses his hands dawn after dawn,
deep into the just-risen flesh.
Cowl white as the flour he scoops, mixes,
forms pat pat into loaves shaped like naves,
it is his chest, filled with the invisible yeast of breath,
that knows by heart the patient kneading together of days,
how long love takes to rise.
Daniel Skach-Mills, American poet.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand….
I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.
David Whyte, Fire in the Earth
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