Tag: impermanence

Seeds

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Crocus Buds Flowers March 16, 2010.jpg

I have posted this before but, like most of our practice, it is something we need to remember, or be mindful of. At times we fall into the trap of complaining,  causing suffering for ourselves or others:

We often ask, ‘what’s wrong?’  Doing so, we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger, and depression, and produce more such seeds. We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us. We should learn to ask, ‘what’s not wrong?’ and be in touch with that.

Thich Nhat Hahn

photo steven depolo

Endless opportunities

Karl Duffy1 Comment

cropped-blossom-tree-140413-e1366004511329.jpg

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.

You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias and aggression. 

You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.

Pema Chodron

Time rushing by

Karl Duffy1 Comment
File:Border collie running down the beach at low tide.jpg
A leap year, so we “gain” an extra day, some extra time.  How will we use it?
Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left?
We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance.
The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life.
Jacob Needleman, American philosopher, born 1934
photo kyknoord

The path

Karl Duffy7 Comments

File:Coast path at Higher Sharpnose Point - geograph.org.uk - 1570182.jpg

We can learn to recognize that the difficulty is our path instead of trying to escape from it. This is a radical yet necessary change in our perspective. When uncomfortable things happen to us, we rarely want to have anything to do with them. We might respond with the belief ‘Things shouldn’t be this way’ or ‘Life shouldn’t be so messy.’ Who says? Who says that life shouldn’t be a mess? When life is not fitting our expectations of how it’s supposed to be, we usually try to change it to fit our expectations. But the key to practice is not to try to change our life but to change our relationship to our expectations — to learn to see whatever is happening as our path.

Ezra Bayda, Being Zen

photo philip halling

Sunday Quote: Able to hold both

Karl DuffyLeave a comment
File:Fogseasonwayanad.jpg
There is no paradise,
no place of true completion
that does not include within its walls
the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield

Not holding on

Karl Duffy5 Comments

abbey river

We can sometimes make our experiences very solid and permanent. This gives them more importance and increases our tendency to become identified with their energy, and get stuck in the story, causing more suffering in this way.

Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night.

In this way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara