What we need is to be interested and to watch, but not interfere or be caught up in what we are thinking. Don’t think of the past, don’t anticipate the future, don’t get fascinated by the present.
See it as it is. Just be there with it. A thought is just a thought. An emotion is just an emotion.
It is like a bubble. It will burst and another one will come up.
Ani Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake
It is so tempting to want the answers before we begin the journey. We like to know the way. We like to have maps. But we are more like a breathing puzzle, a living bag of pieces, and each day shows us what a piece or two is for, where it might go, how it might fit. Over time, a picture starts to emerge by which we being to understand our place in the world. Unfortunately, we waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of inner fortitude by asking others to map our way. At the end of all this stalling, though, we each have to venture out and simply see what happens.
The instructions are in the living, and I confess that of all the times that I thought I liked this or didn’t care for that, not one was of my choosing or yours. For as the Earth was begun like a dish breaking, eternity is that scene slowly reversing,and you and I, and the things we’re drawn to, are merely the pieces of God unbreaking back together.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Autumn sees Nature winding down and moving towards a fallow period, a period of rest, a time when seeds lie buried deep in the earth, and growth happens in a different way. This helps us to see that times when things are not exciting or noticeable – neither markedly pleasant or unpleasant – are an integral part of life. There are significant parts of each day when our experience is not strongly flavoured in one way or another. We have periods when little happens, when we rest or stand still. This is normal, and it doesn’t mean that our lives have lost their focus. If we have a tendency to interpret these periods as if something is wrong,we can generate significant suffering as we are going against a fundamental aspect of human nature itself. As always, the practice is simply to be aware of the feelings as neutral, to not run a storyline around them, and to rest in them, letting them become calm and peaceful.
If we do not cultivate mindfulness, and we feel a neutral feeling, it can turn into an unpleasant feeling because of its association with boredom. We will feel that nothing special is happening – nothing specially good, nothing specially bad, and from that we will often generate painful stories about being a boring person, having a boring life, the world being boring and actually end up in a painful place. Sometimes it seems that we prefer to have painful feelings because they are somewhat exciting and we seem to feel more alive in them than with neutral feelings that we equate with non-existence.
Martine Batchelor, The Spirit of the Buddha
The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it’s a brand new sun. It’s born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say “The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won’t have wasted precious time” Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of no Escape.
A big change in the weather this morning. Very windy overnight and the leaves have finally given up their clinging and let go.
Every year, everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods
One of my favorite Buddhist paramitas (virtues or ideal qualities) is Patient Forbearance, also known as Courageous Acceptance; it helps me befriend all the aspects of myself and various facets of life, both pleasurable and painful, wanted and unwanted. Cultivating this inner strength within my heart and mind brings indescribable peace, balance and harmony to my life and all my relationships, and provides a still centre within…Patient Forbearance is the antidote to anger and violence, as no one can make us angry if we don’t have seeds of anger in our own heart. Michelangelo said that “genius is infinite patience”. Patience is truly the virtue to cultivate for making peace with change and time.
Lama Surya Das, Buddha Standard Time
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