A walk is just as good…
When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having,
just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road,
without a thought on anything but on the ride you are taking.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Scientific American, 1896
[or as I saw it written on a wall in Italy…”pedala senza pensare a nient’altro che alla strada che percorri”]
Who needs to reach beyond all this wonder surrounding us….
Who needs to feel they will survive their death, either as a transcendent conscious soul residing in heaven or re-entering nature again and again?
What we are given is precious enough – a moment of awareness.
Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
What is wrong with us human beings, and has been wrong since time immemorial, is that without ever stating it in so many words, we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality. We behave as if we are never going to die – an infantile arrogance.
But even more injurious than this sense of immortality is what comes with it : the sense that we can engulf this inconceivable universe with our minds.
Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity
The Festival of Samhain, marking the end of the year and the beginning of the new one in the Celtic calendar. Traditionally, bonfires were lit to remind us that the encroaching darkness will not prevail
Thinking gives off smoke to prove the existence of fire
There are wonderful shapes in rising smoke that imagination loves to watch
But it’s a mistake to leave the fire for that filmy sight
Stay here at the flame’s core
Rumi
Daylight saving time in Ireland and around Europe.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte, Sweet Darkness
Mindfulbalance 