We spend much of our time in a cage created by our own fear of discomfort.
Pema Chödrön
Sunday Quote: Cage
Tag: heart
Fat with Blessing
A small green island where one white cow lives alone,
a meadow of an island.
The cow grazes till nightfall, full and fat,
but during the night she panics
and grows thin as a single hair. “What shall I eat
tomorrow? There’s nothing left!”
By dawn, the grass has grown up again, waist-high.
The cow starts eating and by dark the meadow is clipped short.
She’s full of strength and energy, but she panics
in the dark as before, and grows abnormally thin overnight.
The cow does this over and over, and this is all she does.
She never thinks, “This meadow has never failed
to grow back. Why should I be afraid every night that it won’t?”
The cow is the soul. The island field is this world where
that grows lean with fear and fat with blessing.
Lean or fat.
White cow, don’t make yourself miserable
with what is to come, or not to come.
Rumi
Not who we are
The transformation of fear does not mean that we no longer have fearful responses. It means that we no longer believe that those responses are who we are. This is what practice is about: learning to stop believing that our deep-seated reactivity is who we are. Who we really are is much bigger than any of our fear-based conditioned responses. When we can really experience fear, we can see through this false identification, perhaps even glimpsing a vaster sense of Being.
Ezra Bayda, Being Zen
Endless winding beauty
Stop now, right now, and look around you. This is your place in the labyrinth. There is no place else you need to be. See with eyes that aren’t fixed on goals, or focused on flaws. You are part of the endless, winding beauty. And as you learn to see the dappled loveliness of your life, as your new eyes help you begin loving the labyrinth, you’ll slowly come to realize that the labyrinth was made solely for the purpose of loving you.
Martha Beck
Do what you love
Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master’s chaise.
Do what you love. Know your own bone, gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
Thoreau
Make a start
It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought:
which is why we so often prefer to live in an almost world, why we prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities to be safely clouded by fear, why we want the horizon to remain always in the distance, the promise never fully and simply made, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.
David Whyte “Beginning” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
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