Tag: impermanence

A flash of lightning

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File:Temporale.jpg

I had a conversation the other morning with a friend on the need to have a certain lightness in the way we hold life each day, a kind of simplicity. Getting the balance between the demands of love and the pull it places on the heart on one hand and detachment  on the other is not easy. However, modern society stimulates attachment,  so the letting-go perspective of all the wisdom and religious traditions is a useful reminder.  The fact that it is a consistent presence in all cultures would suggest that it is a truth closely related to our deepest happiness:

So you should view this fleeting world
As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Diamond Sutra

A pilgrim soul

Karl Duffy1 Comment

mullaghrellan woods

In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission.

When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition.

It will always mean leaving something behind,…

The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain.

David Richo, How to be an Adult

Inner voyages

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sea

The human heart is never still. … There are always new thoughts and experiences emerging in your life; some moments delight and surprise you, others bring you onto shaky ground. …The mind and heart are wanderers who are always tempted by new horizons. … Your longing frequently takes you on inner voyages that no one would ever guess. …longing keeps the door open and calls towards us the gifts and blessings which our lives dream.

John O’Donohue,

White and black keys

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Toy_piano_keyboard

In life, nothing dwells. The wind blows and then stops. The blossoms burst forth and then fall.  Things come and go. The melody drifts back onto  an aching E flat and then back to E again. The song of your life is played on white and black keys. Sadness is … an essential truth of human life. But let’s not dwell there. Not while the song is still playing.

Karen Maizen Miller, Be Sad

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Full life

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File:Paul Cézanne 018.jpg

Listen, are you breathing just a little,

and calling it a life?

Mary Oliver, Have you ever tried to enter the Long Black Branches

The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cézanne, and this mere
singing wren, who thinks he’s alive
forever, this instant, and may be.

Wendell Berry, Sabbaths, 2001, VIII

In a nutshell…

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

A really clear and succinct definition of mindfulness practice, showing how it includes a evaluating, even judging aspect, discerning between helpful and unhelpful mental energies:

I often like to summarize correct practice in the following way:

Have mindfulness

and know bodily and mental phenomena as they really are

with a mind that is stable and impartial.

Ven Pramote Pamojjo, To see the Truth