Tag: impermanence

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

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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

The real challenge

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:18 years - birthday cake.JPG

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability,

how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate

through our intimacy with disappearance. 

David Whyte

All is grace

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Handful of colourful candies (10422047853).jpg

When you are no longer preoccupied with asking for more and more stuff, then you just take what is given and give what is taken. Life is simple again. A farmer explained it to us this way: “You cannot make the clouds rain more, you cannot make the sun shine less. They are just nature’s gifts — take it or leave it.”

When the things around you are seen as gifts, they are no longer a means to an end; they are the means and the end.

Nipum Mehta Paths are made for Walking

photo Purple Sherbet Photography