The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle: Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses, it swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next.
Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go.
Just remain in the center, watching.
And then forget that you are there.
Lao Tzu, Hua Hu Ching
This is another day, Lord.
I know not what it will bring forth, but make me ready for whatever it may be.
If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely.
If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently.
And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly.
Make these words more than words. Amen.
1979 Book of Common Prayer
Now I become myself.
It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—“
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!…
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant….
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I love
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
May Sarton, 1912 – 1995, American Poet, Now I Become Myself [extracts]
Chiyono was a 13th-century Japanese Buddhist nun for many years, striving hard for enlightenment. One night she was doing her duty, carrying a bucket, which slipped and broke. In that instant, something shifted. She came to see that clarity arises not from tightly holding on, but from attending to what is right in front of us. Instead of clinging to the idea of who we should be, or what is the “perfect” life, we’re invited to witness reality as it unfolds, in all its mess. This is the poem she wrote:
This way and that way I tried to keep the pail together,
Hoping the weak bamboo would never break.
Suddenly the bottom fell out.
No more water;
no more moon in the water—
Emptiness in my hand.
The Buddha talked of the eight great vicissitudes of life:
Pleasure and Pain, Gain and Loss, Praise and Blame, and Fame and Disrepute.
These changes happen to everyone.
One of great laws of the dharma that I find myself often rediscovering is “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Joseph Goldstein, One Dharma
The alternative to a breaking heart is a closed one, and that is a deeper kind of death.
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark,
and not to turn.
Stanley Kunitz, American poet, The Testing-Tree
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