Waiting, watching, trusting…what people have done at this time of year since the beginning of time. These universal themes, rooted in nature, speak to the heart all through the year
Hope begins in the dark,
the stubborn hope that if you just show up
and try to do the right thing,
the dawn will come.
You wait and watch and work:
you don’t give up.
Anne Lamott
Very cold weather here this past week.
This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
John O’Donohue, from Beannacht, Book of Blessings
If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth.
This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily we dedicate ourselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities – “selves”, that is to say, regarded as objects. Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them they are real).
Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
What the Buddha said is that you are a verb, not a noun. What you’re doing is what is real, not who’s doing it.
Buddha said this is the basic mistake we all make and is why we suffer.
For example, only walking is real, not the walker or the path. And, the more attached you are to yourself – “you” being a thing – the more trouble you get into.
Mas Kodani, Jodo Shinshu Buddhist teacher
The first real cold spell of winter expected over the next few days. We prefer life to be all sunshine, but…
Without the bitterest cold that penetrates to the very bone,
how can plum blossoms send forth their fragrance all over the world?
Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Buddhist monk, founder of the Soto school of Zen.
The art of living is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other,
It consists in being sensitive to each moment in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive
Alan Watts
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