The Uncomplicated moment

cherry_blossom

Mindfulness, seeing clearly, means awakening to the happiness of the uncomplicated moment. We complicate moments. Hardly anything happens without the mind spinning it up into an elaborate production. It’s the elaboration that makes life more difficult than it needs to be.

Sylvia Boorstein

Sweeping out clutter

path

But it’s not so simple, this sort of “quiet hour” : it has to be learnt. A lot of unimportant inner litter and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside with irrelevant distractions. True, there may be edifying emotions and thoughts, too, but the clutter is ever-present. So let this be the aim of the meditation: to turn ones innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view so that something of “God” can enter you, and something of “Love” too.

Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

Sunday Quote: Colour

ladybird 130413

There is not one little blade of grass,

there is no colour in this world

that is not intended to make men rejoice.

John Calvin

Sunday Quote: Sitting with dragons

File:Chinese draak.jpg

Our deepest fears

are the dragons guarding from us

our greatest treasures.

Rilke

Mysteries

46   Sunlit bloomTruly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver, Evidence.

Sunday quote: In darkness and silence

There is a place

where words are born of silence.

Rumi