What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Philip Larkin
Today is where we live
Tag: impermanence
A prayer for the journey
I no longer ask you for either happiness or paradise; all I ask of You is to listen and let me be aware of Your listening.
I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You.
I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship.
Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel, One Generation After
Learning from nature: the seasons cannot be hurried
If you cultivate patience, you almost can’t help cultivating mindfulness, and your meditation practice will gradually become richer and more mature. If you really aren’t trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself. It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself. Being in a hurry usually doesn’t help and it can create a great deal of suffering. Patience is an ever-present alternative to the mind’s endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. From the perspective of patience, things happen because other things happen. Nothing is separate and isolated
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are
Photo by Donald Macauley
Doors that open
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
Adrienne Rich, Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Fragile love
The strongest love
is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.
Paul Coelho, Eleven Minutes
A full life
A man is rich
in proportion to the number of things
which he can afford to let alone.
Thoreau
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