Familiar stories

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We can have a lot of stories about how our lives are heading, or what our strengths and weaknesses are, or why things are not going as the should go…

One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game.  It can be quite disorientating to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true – it never was true…In fact, the continued retelling of it simply imprisons us. We are used to the prison,  however, we have indeed fitted cushions and armchairs and made it comfortable and have locked the door from the inside.

David Whyte, Letter from the House, Winter 2012

Sunday Quote: Spontaneity

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We need the tonic of wildness

Thoreau

Not always straight

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It may be that

when we no longer know

what to do,

we have come

to our real work,

and when we

no longer know

which way to go,

we have begun

our real journey

Wendell Berry, The Real Work

photo Anna16

Just the way it is

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Something we need to hold in mind at all times...

If you are invested in security and certainty

you are on the wrong planet

Pema Chodron

Sunday Quote: Impermanence

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A self that goes on changing

is a self that goes on living

Virginia Wolff

Being just in the now and not in time

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I was at an event yesterday where a speaker said that a certain tribe in the Amazon have no concept of time, no words for “week” or “month”. Strange, since we allow these ideas exert such pressure on us. They, on the contrary, do not think of time as a “thing”, or understand the idea of “I haven’t got the time”, racing against the clock to get something completed.  This allows them to relate differently to the moment; they are not persecuted by an idea of a perfect moment, or relate to it just through the thinking faculty; they are grounded in the now, no matter how it is:

If your relationship to the present moment is not right,

nothing can ever be right in the future,

because when the future comes,

it’s the present moment.

Eckhart Tolle

photo arjan richter