Only one thing made him happy
and now that it was gone
everything made him happy.
Leonard Cohen
Tag: impermanence
The most important thing we can do
Non-doing has nothing to do with being indolent or passive. Quite the contrary. It takes great courage and energy to cultivate non-doing, both in stillness and in activity. Nor is it easy to make a special time for non-doing and to keep at it in the face of everything in our lives which needs to be done.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Non-doing
The tree on the mountain height is its own enemy.
The grease that feeds the light devours itself.
The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down! The lacquer tree is profitable: they maim it.
Every man knows how useful it is to be useful.
No one seems to know How useful it is to be useless.
Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu
Just being with
Once or twice a year the abbot at the San Francisco Zen Center, Tenshin Reb Anderson, comes to speak with the hospice volunteers.
One night he gave a talk that included the best advice I’ve ever heard on caregiving.
He said simply, “Stay close and do nothing.”
That’s how we try to practice at Zen Hospice Project.
We stay close and do nothing. We sit still and listen to the stories.
Frank Ostaseski
Sunday Quote: Looking up
If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life,
your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
Rabindranath Tagore
Confronting change
Our lives ask us to die and be reborn every time we confront change – change within ourselves and change in our world. When we descend all the way down to the bottom of a loss, and dwell patiently, with an open heart, in the darkness and pain, we can bring back up with us the sweetness of life and the exhilaration of inner growth. When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self — the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey. This is the way to live a meaningful and hopeful life — a life of real happiness and inner peace.
Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open
Mindfulbalance 