After the cold and the storms, bright Spring-like days in Ireland for the weekend.
And if you missed a day, there was always the next,
and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit.
Louise Gluck, Sunrise [extract]
It is hard to believe that the practice can be reduced to something so simple, paying direct attention to the present moment – to this breath, this person, this walk, to this washing of the dishes. We imagine it should be something grander. It may be simple; however, it is not easy
One day a man asked Zen master Ikkyu, “Master, will you please write for me some pointers to the highest wisdom?”
Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word: “Attention.”
“Is that all?” asked the man. “Will you not add something more ?”
Ikkyu then wrote : “Attention. Attention. Attention.”
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering
is worse than the suffering itself.
Paulo Coehlo, The Alchemist
In the Sufi Master Rumi’s “Table Talk”, there is this fierce and pointed passage:
“The master said there is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but were not to forget this, there would be no cause to worry, while if you remembered, performed and attended to everything else, but forgot that one thing, you would in fact have done nothing whatsoever.
It is as if a king had sent you to a country to carry out one special, specific task. You go to the country and you perform a hundred other tasks, but if you have not performed the task you were sent for, it is as if you have performed nothing at all.
So each person has come into the world for a particular task, and that is their purpose. If they don’t perform it, they will have done nothing.
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,
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
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
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