To be interested in the changing seasons
is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
Tag: impermanence
On the journey
Four Rules For Life
Show up.
Pay attention.
Tell the truth.
Don’t be attached to the results.
Angeles Arrien, 1940 – April 24, 2014
No road
Walker, your footsteps
are the road, and nothing more.
Walker, there is no road, the road is made by walking.
Walking you make the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path you never
again will step upon.
Walker, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.
Antonio Machado, Proverbs and songs #29
photo arbget47j
Believing our thoughts
When thoughts arise, then do all things arise.
When thoughts vanish, then do all things vanish.
Huang Po, c. 850
Timelessness
On the longest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere….
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness
then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present
Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.
Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.431
Not postponing life any more
The finality of death is meant to challenge us to decision, the decision to be fully present here now, and so begin eternal life. For eternity rightly understood is not the perpetuation of time, on and on, but rather the overcoming of time by the now that does not pass away. But we are always looking for opportunities to postpone the decision. So if you say: “Oh, after this I will have another life and another life,” you might never live, but keep dragging along half dead because you never face death.
Don Juan says to Carlos Castaneda, “That is why you are so moody and not fully alive, because you forget you are to die; you live as if you were going to live forever.” What remembrance of death is meant to do, as I understand it, is to help us make that decision.
David Steindl-Rast, Learning to Die
