Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, “The flag moves.” The other said, “The wind moves.” They argued back and forth but could not agree. Hui-neng, said: “Gentlemen! It is not the flag that moves. It is not the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves.” The two monks were struck with awe.
Chinese master Hui-neng (638-713), the Sixth Ch’an Patriarch is considered by some to be the true father of Zen.
photo matt brown
It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living
Eckhart Tolle
photo european people’s party
It isn’t the things that happen to us that cause us to suffer;
it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.
photo of a robin sheltering from the wind and the rain by phil sangwell
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
We need the tonic of wildness
Thoreau
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
