The start of the Advent season…
A person is not a thing or a process,
but an opening through which the absolute manifests.
Martin Heidegger
Tag: heart
Exquisitely singular
Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute.
Don’t reject them, let them come through when they’re ready, don’t think you can plan it all out.
This day will never, no matter how long you live, happen again.
It is exquisitely singular. It will never again be exactly repeated.
Naomi Shihab Nye, I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven
How we work with our minds
Love and concern for all are not things some of us are born with and others are not. Rather, they are results of what we do with our minds. We can choose to transform our minds so that they embody love, or we can allow them to develop habits and false conceptions of separation.
Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness
All human experience as a privilege
The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction, No. 198
Getting out of the way
Bernie Glassman, a Zen teacher, has a practice called ‘Bearing Witness.’ You go into a hard, complex situation with the mind of not knowing, of having no idea or opinion, and instead, feel, listen, and be in the actual situation, becoming one with it. This nonjudgmental state of mind can position you so that you might be able to find a way to help, not out of your own need to make something better so that you feel better or in order to alleviate your own fear, but so that you act when empty of yourself. You get yourself out of the way.
Natalie Goldberg, The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language
The privilege of this day
Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.
Bill Bryson, 10 Simple Rules for Happiness, Graduate College Commencement Ceremony Address
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