Tag: impermanence

Turn the pages

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Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

* * *
Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.

Mary Oliver, A Settlement

New and wholesome

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Each time we go out, the world is open and free; it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome from it each day. It is a travesty of possibility and freedom to think we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street, the one right way is all that is allotted to us. Certainty is a subtle destroyer…

John O Donohue, Eternal Echoes

The beauty in daily things

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Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful! a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.

Howard Nemerov, 1920 – 1991, Pulitzer Prize winning American Poet, Vermeer

Less is needed

Karl Duffy6 Comments

If you feel that your dreams aren’t coming true, you might think that you need to do more, or to think and strategize more. In fact, what you might need is less – less noise coming to you from both inside and outside – so that you have the space for your heart’s truest intention to germinate and flourish.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Silence

Grumbling

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It takes faith to believe in tomorrow. But I think it takes more faith to believe that I am where I’m meant to be in my life right now

It’s easy to have hopes and dreams for our future, to have plans. We all need those. They help direct our path. And having things to look forward to, even the little things, makes life fun.

But having faith that on some far-off day our lives are going to be great and better – believing in tomorrow – doesn’t take nearly as much spiritual discipline as it does to believe in today.

Sometimes I really don’t like some of the things I have to do or that are going on in my life. I tend to weigh myself down with mumbling and grumbling, balking, digging my heels in, obsessing, dreading, ….and generally making things worse than they are. It’s not enough that I have to go through, endure, or do what I must. I make the job three times as hard with my attitude.

Melody Beattie, Faith

Sunday Quote: New

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Every thought a present moment

Every moment a rebirth. 

Master Shen Yeng, Illuminating Silence: Insights on the Path of Chinese Zen Meditation