Joy is that kind of happiness that does not depend on what happens.
David Steindal Rast, born 1926, Catholic monk, founder of A Network for Grateful Living
photo yumi kimura
Tag: impermanence
Cheerfulness
A post for the made-up “Blue Monday”, the day in the year, they tell us, we are most likely to feel gloomy.
Perhaps the best advice for our physical and mental health this week, as we bring our inner self to work with whatever outward situation we find ourselves in…. and not from a modern self-help book.
A cheerful heart is good medicine
Proverbs 17:22
photo david shankbone
Not worth getting excited over
A lot of what we hold on to as important- even just a week or two ago – turns out to be, like everything else, impermanent, arising and passing away according to conditions.
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be
Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook
photo albert bridge
Sunday Quote: One step at a time
The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking,
it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
photo of Tibetan prayer wheel, Etnografiska museum, Stockholm
Fresh starts
A friend reminded me yesterday that it is all about starting each day anew, with fresh eyes – like lighting a candle in the darkness and seeing things in the glow of a kind light:
I’m heading into 2017 aspiring to look at life through the eyes of a child. Buddhists call it “beginner’s mind” — a corrective to the cynicism that comes when we let hard realities darken our vision and diminish our imagination. It’s a way of looking at the world that doesn’t deny the darkness, but makes fresh starts possible in everything – from our personal to our political lives.
What’s “the growing edge” in your life?
Whatever it is, may 2017 be a year in which our adult powers dance with our child-like imaginations to help make all things new.
Parker Palmer
With thanks to makebelieveboutique.com
Begin again
Often the message this time of year is to completely re-shape or transform ourselves. This can sometimes mask a kind of aggression towards ourselves and suggest that most change needs to be dramatic. In most cases acceptance, integration and starting over are what is really needed :
That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.
Mark Nepo, Hearing the Cries of the World
Mindfulbalance 