A monk asked the master Sengcan: “Master, show me the way to liberation.”
Sengcan replied: “Who binds you?”
The monk replied: “No one binds me.”
Sengcan said: “Then why do you seek liberation?”
Tag: impermanence
Sunday Quote: Where hope and history rhyme
Birdsong brings relief to my longing.
I am just as ecstatic as they are, but with nothing to say!
Please, universal soul, practice some song, or something, through me!
Rumi
How we hold things
The question is not, never, ever, whether or not we will be given challenges and limitations. We will. The question is, how will we hold them, how will we be changed, how will they shape us, what will we bring to the healing of them, what, if anything will be born in its place.
Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having and Doing Enough
Sunday Quote: Unfolding
At its heart, the journey of each life is a pilgrimage through unforeseen sacred places that enlarge and enrich the soul.
As a river flows in ideal sequence
May your love discover time is presence.
John O’Donohue
Explorer
On the day that the Three Kings journeyed from afar following a star which no one else believed in…
Let no one keep you from your journey,
no rabbi or priest, no mother
who wants you to dig for treasures
she misplaced, no father
who won’t let one life be enough,
no lover who measures their worth
by what you might give up,
no voice that tells you in the night
it can’t be done.
Let nothing dissuade you
from seeing what you see
or feeling the winds that make you
want to dance alone
or go where no one
has yet to go.
You are the only explorer.
Your heart, the unreadable compass.
Your soul, the shore of a promise
too great to be ignored.
Mark Nepo, Breaking Surface
The core conversation
It might be surprising to think that there are just as many forms of courage and creativity associated with disappearance and doing without; just as many satisfying elements of aliveness associated with a winter as with spring. This central, core conversation to which we return in each succeeding winter is both nourishing and deeply disturbing, it seems heedless of any flimsy structures we may have erected, it seems fiery in that it burns familiar things away and yet provides another form of warmth emanating from a more nested, interior hearth. In my experience the first necessity of an individual in finding this fiery, core conversation is a radical form of simplification. To get to the core conversation we have to withdraw from the edges. Whatever expenses we have been making at the margins of our lives in terms of emotions, finances or time-based commitment must be brought back to the central conversation that makes the most sense.
David Whyte
Mindfulbalance 