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
Tag: impermanence
Sunday Quote: Impermanence
A self that goes on changing
is a self that goes on living
Virginia Wolff
Being just in the now and not in time
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
Holding on too tightly
Not that difficult to grasp in the weather here in Ireland this last week. Not so easy to grasp in our inner lives:
Nothing in its essence is one way or the other. All around us the wind, the fire, the earth, and the water, are always taking on different qualities; they’re like magicians. We also change like the weather. We ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. We fail to see that like the weather, we are fluid, not solid.
And so we suffer.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
photo of clouds in Malahide, Dublin, by Miguel Mendez
How we choose to tell the story
We stick to the wrong thing quite often, not because it will come to fruition by further effort, but because we cannot let go of the way we have decided to tell the story and we become further enmeshed even by trying to make sense of what entraps us, when what is needed is a simple, clean breaking away. To remove our selves entirely and absolutely, abruptly and at times un-compromisingly is often the real and radically courageous break for freedom.
David Whyte, ‘Withdrawal’ From Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
photo waffen5
Our Practice for today. Simple, but not easy.
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
Galway Kinnell, Prayer
photo thomas brown
