The changing nature of everything

Above all, the attitude of Buddhist meditation is one that keeps remembering and focusing on the changing nature of everything. When we witness, listen and relate to sensory experience as change, its power to burn, hold and trap us wanes. There is a sense of dispassion, not through rejection or some other kind of negative attitude to the sensory experience, but just through observing it, bringing the mind fully on to it – as fully as we can. Then the heart grows quiet and still.

Ajahn Sucitto

Brokenness

One does not have to be completely satisfied with everything before one can be content. Similarly, everything does not have to be just as you would like it in your life for you to be grateful.

The wilderness constantly reminds me that wholeness is not about perfection….I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds. Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness – mine, yours, ours – need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.

Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

Surprised by joy

Our life journey contain many twists and turns and we all make mistakes along the way. And yet, Spring returns

I write

erase

rewrite.

Erase again, and then

A poppy blooms.

Hokusai, 1760 – 1849, Japanese painter, printmaker

As it is

The biggest error we make in our life … is to think that … our life just as it is, with all of its problems, … has something wrong with it. And because we think that, we get busy... Our life is always all right. … But since we refuse to accept life as it is, because of our preference for things that are pleasurable, we pick and choose from life.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

Sunday Quote: Birth to oneself

A new moon teaches gradualness
and deliberation and how one gives birth
to oneself slowly
. Patience with small details
makes perfect a large work, like the universe.
What nine months of attention does for an embryo
forty early mornings will do for your gradually growing wholeness

Rumi

Asking the dog

Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.

Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.

Mary Oliver, I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life