Everything is changing, including you.
That is an actual fact you can see.
This is not something you will know after reading many books.
So if you have a lot of suffering in your everyday life,
you will actually feel the most important teaching of Buddhism:
that everything changes, and there is nothing to stick to.
from the great Shunryu Suzuki roshi
When feeling stuck or disconnected from the miracle of life, as will happen to us all, try to listen, see, feel, and just take in. In order to be whole, suspend your criticism. For life is not a matter of taste, but of awakening, not a matter of finding things pleasing or disturbing, but of finding things completing, not a matter of liking or disliking, but of opening to the geography of one’s soul
Mark Nepo
Each person becomes a wanderer again and again in the course of life, as we find our true self by becoming lost. Each person carries a “story that could be true.” Each crossroad in life secretly asks the question: Who are you really?
Michael Meade, 1944 – American author and mythologist.
Today is the Celtic feast of Imbolc, the start of the Spring in the old Celtic calendar and here in Ireland. The meaning of Imbolc may derive from an old Irish word meaning “in the belly”, referring to sheep being pregnant. It was connected with the budding of new life, which although hidden, gives rise to hope because Spring will soon be here.
Hiding is underestimated. We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world…..Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named.
We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure; our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light too much, too early and too often, our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with too easily articulated ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others. What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about our selves….Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.
David Whyte, Consolations
This shell is not of my own making
Borrowing it from heaven and earth
I live out each and every day
Eichi Enomoto, 1903 – 1998, Hermit crab
One’s life is a combination of what one borrows and what one is gifted with. Without borrowing all the strength from heaven and earth, one cannot truly live, even for a minute
Shunda Aoyama, Zen Seeds
We can wish that things were different, but…
Where is liberation to be found? The Buddha taught that both human suffering and human enlightenment are found in our own fathom-long body with its senses and mind. If not here and now, where else will we find it?
Jack Kornfield
