Tag: impermanence

Sunday Quote: Live without roads

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To live without roads

seemed one way not to get lost.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Seasons

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What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until it all ends.
 

Mary Oliver  What Can I Say [extract]

You cannot hold gravity

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The universe does not
revolve around you.
The stars and planets spinning
through the ballroom of space
dance with one another
quite outside of your small life.
You cannot hold gravity
or seasons; even air and water
inevitably evade your grasp.
Why not, then, let go?

You could move through time
like a shark through water,
neither restless nor ceasing,
absorbed in and absorbing
the native element.
Why pretend you can do otherwise?
The world comes in at every pore,
mixes in your blood before
breath releases you into
the world again. Did you think
the fragile boundary of your skin
could build a wall?

Listen. Every molecule is humming
its particular pitch.
Of course you are a symphony.
Whose tune do you think
the planets are singing
as they dance?

Lynn Ungar, Boundaries

How to go deeper

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Another month ends. Our rituals and practices, like sitting in meditation, are like a well-worn path which allow us to deepen our capacity to see

To learn something new,

take the path that you took yesterday.

John Burroughs, 1837-1921, American naturalist, quoted in Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

What is freedom?

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When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking,

you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking.

When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice – the thinker – but the one who is aware of it.

Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.

Eckhart Tolle, Silence Speaks

Loving our lives

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When Bodhidharma was asked, “What is the first principle of the holy teaching”, he didn’t say suffering. He said, “Vast emptiness. Nothing holy.” This is what the Heart Sutra says, too. The Heart Sutra says, “Things are founded on emptiness.”

This means really that things don’t truly have a cause. Things have a virtue in themselves beyond anything we can say that causes them. So you have a virtue in yourself beyond anything that brought it about. Any suffering that arises in you because of your history, any gifts you have because of your history, these are strong things, yet they are also just a pure appearance of Buddha nature. Even your suffering and also your joy. I think in some sense we can’t take credit for either. We just have to learn to love our lives so deeply that we welcome whatever comes.

John Tarrant, Poison and Joy