Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture.
You never realize that all you needed was to change perspective.
Miguel Syjuco, Illustrado, 2008 Man Asian Literary Prizewinner
Tag: impermanence
A lot of thinking
The concept of beginning and ending is time, produced by thought. Can we see, right now, that beginning and end, getting somewhere, being somebody, wanting to get the something I lack, are all products of the imagination. As long as this isn’t clear, this bodymind remains tied up in knots. Can we see that a thought is always away from this present moment, where time does not exist?
Toni Parker, The Wonder of Presence.
photo adam jwc
There is nothing ahead
Some of the sentiments expressed around New Year – or the current fad of people posting pictures online – can lead us to think that looking to the future, or looking for happiness somewhere other than where we are, is good for our mental health. These beautiful few lines from Rumi – an extract from a longer inspiring poem – reminds us that it is in this moment, in what is right here, and not in our concepts, is where we need to keep our awareness.
Forget the future.
I’d worship someone who could do that.
On the way you may want to look back, or not.
But if you can say, There’s nothing ahead,
there will be nothing there.
Rumi,
from Coleman Barks, Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing
photo kevin law
Embracing the New
“I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardship
and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces,
then I will swim.”
Homer, The Odyssey
On my printer I have this quote from Odysseus, as every morning we awake and we face the same perils as that ancient mariner. Every day we are cast upon the high seas of the soul. Whether we wish to be or not, we are already there, and have orders to show up. We begin showing up when we ask ourselves where are we blocked by fear, by lack of permission to live our own life, by self-doubt? What do we gain from staying stuck? Where is life served by our staying stuck? Who, or what are we waiting for before beginning our real life? How does staying stuck help anyone around us? Every day we are summoned anew to high adventure on the tenebrous seas of the soul. Living our lives, and not someone else’s, calls us to voyage, and if our familiar structures falter, then we swim.
James Hollis, Embracing the New: Avoiding a Routinized Life
photo Bernd Reuschenberg
What we do not see
We seldom notice how each day is a holy place
Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens,
Transforming our broken fragments
Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.
Somewhere in us a dignity presides
That is more gracious than the smallness
That fuels us with fear and force,
A dignity that trusts the form a day takes.
So at the end of this day, we give thanks
For being betrothed to the unknown
And for the secret work
Through which the mind of the day
And wisdom of the soul become one
John O’Donohue, The Inner History of a Day
photo of Trim, Co Meath, by Denis O’Donovan
Sunday Quote: On the shortest day in the year
With life as short as a half taken breath,
don’t plant anything but love.
Rumi
photo gila national forest
