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
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
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
We imagined [the divine] as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers . . . This palpable world, which we are used to treating with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association, is a holy place.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu
The washing never gets done.
The furnace never gets heated.
Books never get read.
Life is never completed.
Life is like a ball which one must continually
catch and hit so that it won’t fall.
When the fence is repaired at one end,
it collapses at the other. The roof leaks,
the kitchen door won’t close,
there are cracks in the foundation,
the torn knees of children’s pants . . .
One can’t keep everything in mind.
The wonder is
that beside all this one can notice
the spring which is so full of everything
continuing in all directions – into evening clouds,
into the redwing’s song and into every
drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow,
as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.
Jaan Kaplinski, 1940 – 2021, Estonian poet, philosopher and cultural critic, The wonder is
I do not live happily or comfortably
with the cleverness of our times.
The talk is all about computers,
the news is all about bombs and blood.
This morning, in the fresh field,
I came upon a hidden nest.
It held four warm, speckled eggs.
I touched them.
Then went away softly,
having felt something more wonderful
Than all the electricity of New York City.
Mary Oliver, With Thanks to the Field Sparrow Whose Voice is So Delicate and Humble
Mindfulbalance 