Tag: impermanence

a new month: waking up to what is

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

From the beginning all beings are Buddha.
It’s like water and ice – there is no ice without water – outside of us there is no Buddha.
It is sad that people ignore what’s near
And search for truth far away.
We are like someone surrounded by water
Crying out “I thirst!”
Like the son of a rich person going around poor on this earth we endlessly circle the Six Worlds.
The cause of our circling is ignorance.
From dark path to dark path we walk.
How can we be freed from the wheel of birth-and-death?

Hakuin’s Song of Zazen

Opposites and contraries

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From what I gather in reading ancient texts, right up to the present, human beings have always been confronted by the same kinds of problems. I think that this world is not a realm that admits to a solution. That isn’t what this world is about. It’s a different kind of activity that we have here. We have to deal with good and evil continually. With joy and despair, with all the antinomies, all the opposites and contraries. That’s what our life is about. We can’t abdicate that.

Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters

Just this is enough

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Renunciation is “Just this is enough”. I really like that as a description of renunciation. Can you meet your life just as it is and say “Just this is enough”? Or are you always asking for something more? That’s where suffering comes in: “This isn’t enough. I need something more”. Then it always feels as if something is lacking. How can we meet our life as it is wholeheartedly, just like this? This is what our practice is: that is finding your home in the midst of homelessness, right here.

Zenkei Blanche Hartman, Seeds for a Boundless Life

taking the light within

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The Summer Solstice

Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible.

Awakening and surrender: they  frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.

John O’Donohue.

photo of the Grianán of Aileach in County Donegal by Mark McGaughey on Wikipedia

They come and they go

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When energies inside start to move, you do not have to go there. For instance, when your thoughts start, you do not have to go with them.

Let’s say you’re outside taking a walk and a car drives by. Your thoughts say, ‘Boy, I wish I had that car.’ You could just keep on walking, but instead you start getting upset. You want a car like that, but your salary isn’t high enough. So you begin thinking about how you can get a raise or a different job. You didn’t have to do all that. It could have just been – here comes the car and there it goes, and here comes the thought and there it goes.

They’re both gone together because you didn’t go with them.

Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul

a poppy blooms

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Our daily efforts and failings. And all the while, there is beauty around us

I write, erase, rewrite,
Erase again, and then
A poppy blooms

Hokushi, 1603-1868, Japanese haiku poet.

Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.

Billy Collins, PIcnic, Lightning [excerpt]