The current of life requires us to stand up, again and again, and we are not defeated when we are worn down, just exposed anew at a deeper level. We are meant to live in between the two. In this way, life keeps getting more and more precious. It is a natural law like gravity or osmosis: Stand up to be worn bare. It is how everything in the way is thinned, so that we can feel just how thoroughly alive we are.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Life goes on.
No mountain peak actually impales the sun.
If you come to a gap in your path, jump across.
Han Shan, Chinese Chan (Zen) poet, 9th Century.
We have been raised to fear the yes in ourselves
Audre Lorde, 1934 – 1992, American writer and civil rights activist
Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky,
How beautiful it is?
All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness
There is a poem, there is a song.
Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring.
When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with
The music of many leaves,
Which in due season fall and are blown away.
And this is the way of life.
Krisnamurti
The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction, No. 198
Emptiness refers to the fact that things are not as solid and real as they seem. something that we hold in our hands might appear completely solid and unchanging, but that’s an illusion. Whatever it may be, it is changing all the time, and when we investigate, we find change and fluidity where before we assumed permanence and solidity. This does not make the phenomenal world nothing; at the same time, its essential nature is not what we usually think it is.
Yongey Mingpur Rinoche, In Love with the World
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