All Saints Day. We sometimes think that saints and bodhisattvas have the ability to float above everything.
Life does continually go up and down. People and situations are unpredictable and so is everything else.
Everybody knows the pain of getting what we don’t want: saints, sinners, winners, losers. I feel gratitude that someone saw the truth and pointed out that we don’t suffer this kind of pain because of our personal inability to get things right.
Pema Chodron
In a similar fashion, they believed that Halloween was the time in the year when these two worlds were closest.
The ancient Druids are said to have taken a special interest in in-between things like mistletoe, which is neither quite a plant nor quite a tree, and mist, which is neither quite a rain nor quite air, and dreams, which are neither quite waking nor quite sleep. They believed that in such things as those they were able to glimpse the mystery of the two worlds at once
Frederick Buechner 1926 – 2022, American author, Presbyterian minister, preacher, and theologian
I don’t know anything about consciousness.
I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing
Shunryu Suzuki roshi, 1904 – 1971
Be silent
only the hand of God can remove the burdens of the heart
Rumi
Lastly, I wish to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets: The whole future has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: “Only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind“
Pablo Neruda, 1904 – 1973, Chilean poet
When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves-from other people, relationships, or material goods-or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion.
Completion comes, not from adding another piece to ourselves,
but from surrendering our ideas of perfection
Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective
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