with nothing

The Absolute works with nothing.

The workshop, the materials are what do not exist.

Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.

Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,

where something might be planted,

a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.

Rumi

Stop fighting

Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past.

To come into the present is to stop the war.

Jack Kornfield

The changing of the year

When the stories of our life no longer bind us, we discover within them something greater. 

We discover that within the very limitations of form, of our maleness and femaleness, of our parenthood and our childhood, of gravity on the earth and the changing of the seasons, is the freedom and harmony we have sought for so long. 

Our individual life is an expression of the whole mystery, and in it we can rest in the center of the movement, the center of all worlds.

Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart

Take the step

Let me fall if I must.

The one I will become will catch me

Baal Shem Tov, 1698 – 1760, Jewish mystic, regarded as the founder of Hasidic Judaism

Just be ready

“You don’t have to

prove anything” my mother said. “Just be ready

for what God sends

Poet William Stafford died of a heart attack in August 1993, having written a poem that morning with these words…

Completeness

The start of a New Year often gives rise to a restless energy, thoughts of needing to do better, to achieve more, to comparing our actual life with some better life, berating ourselves for perceived failures and shortcomings. Dogen reminds us to let go of this drama, these continually shifting ideas created by the mind, and rest in a sense of completeness

No creature ever falls short of its own completeness

Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground.

Dogen