I gaze on myself in the stream’s emerald flow,
Sit on a boulder by a cliff.
My mind, a lonely cloud,
Leans on nothing, needs nothing
From the world and its endless events.
HanShan, Chinese Buddhist and Taoist poet
Undisturbed
Tag: impermanence
The mind is all stories
Dipa Ma taught that the mind is all stories, one after another, like nesting dolls. You open one, and another is inside. Open that one, and there is another story emerging. When you get to the last nesting doll, the smallest one, and open it, inside of it is – what? It’s empty, nothing there, and all around you are the empty shells of the stories of your life
Amy Schmidt, author, Dipa Ma: The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master
[Dipa Ma, 1911 – 1989 was an Indian meditation teacher of Theravada Buddhism, who had a big influence on early teachers in the Insight Meditation Society in Barre Massachusetts]
A flash of lightning
A lot of thunderstorms these days in Ireland
The Buddha often used images to try to convey some of this sense of all appearances arising, with nothing we can hold on to. He said life is like a rainbow, an echo, a dream, a drop of dew on a blade of grass, a flash of lightning in a summer sky.
What does a deeper glimpse into this truth of change offer us, ultimately? We see that there is a tender, exultant beauty to every hour, in fact to every minute we have just because we are alive. ..The fragility and dynamism of life is what makes it so vital. Every experience, every encounter, every realized desire, and every unfulfilled longing that comes into our lives is moving, changing…
Life is short, and it is sacred
Sharon Salzberg, Real LIfe: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom
Build your own
This is where we run into trouble in terms of being fulfilled… You have to make your own happiness, wherever you are.
Your job isn’t going to make you happy, your spouse isn’t going to make you happy, the weather isn’t going to make you happy… You have to decide what you want, and you have to find that way of doing it, whether or not the outside circumstances are going to participate in your success… You have to be able to create your own happiness, period.
Jonathan Fields, American author, in interview with Debbie Millman on the GoodLIfe Project
Being with what is
At any moment, whatever we are experiencing, only one of two things is ever happening: either we are being with what is, or else we are resisting what is.
Being with what is means letting ourselves have and feel our experience, just as it is right now. …
This is where genuine creativity, health, and communication, as well as spiritual power, arise from.
John Welwood
Finally, instructions for life
We waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of inner fortitude by asking others to map our way.
At the end of all this stalling, though, we each have to venture out and simply see what happens.
The instructions are in the living,
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
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