Tag: impermanence

A new month

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”

Offer yourself to the world — your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart — with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail.

To grow in love and service, you — I, all of us — must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success… Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn — that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice.

Parker Palmer, The Six Pillars of the Wholehearted Life, Commencement Address,  Naropa University

Sunday Quote: Unsettled

Karl Duffy2 Comments

People wish to be settled;

only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is this?

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A classic practice in the Korean Zen tradition – may help with staying open to our experience today

In the Korean Zen tradition, one generally meditates on the koan, What is this? This question derives from an encounter between the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng (638–713 C.E.), and a young monk, Huaijang. The most important part of the practice is for the question to remain alive and for your whole body and mind to become a question. In Zen they say that you have to ask with the pores of your skin and the marrow of your bones. A Zen saying points out: Great questioning, great awakening; little questioning, little awakening; no questioning, no awakening. 

Martine Batchelor, What is this?

In a daze

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Day and night gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them.

 David Steindl-Rast

Empty your boat

Karl Duffy5 Comments

Chuang Tzu tells about a man crossing a river when an empty skiff slams into his. The man does not become angry, as he would if there was a boatman in the other skiff.

So, says Chuang Tzu, “Empty your own boat as you cross the river of the world.”

In solitude, I can empty my boat. Can I do it when I’m in the company of other people? Maybe: Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one’s self. It is not about the absence of other people – it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others.

Parker J. Palmer, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

Leave it alone

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When you have an unpleasant feeling, don’t grab hold of it and turn it over and over.
Instead, leave it alone so it can flow.
The wave of emotion will naturally recede on its own
as long as you don’t feed it by dwelling on it.
To get food unstuck from a frying pan, just pour water in the pan and wait.
After a while the food loosens on its own.
Don’t struggle to heal your wounds.
Just pour time into your heart and wait.
When your wounds are ready, they will heal on their own.

Haemin Sunim, The Things You can see Only when You Slow Down