Seeing the way takes time

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of  instability and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.

Do not try to force them on as though you could be today what time –  that is to say, grace –  and circumstances,  acting on your own good will – will make you tomorrow.

Teilhard de Chardin 

The highest point

 

Most of us have learned to live, or have been encouraged to live, in a manner where we get love.

We want to be loved, and we think that being loved is the highest point.

But actually, loving is the highest point.

Stephen Levine

One step at a time

Keep walking, though there is no place to get to.

Don’t try to see through the distance.

That’s not for human beings.

Move within

but don’t move the way fear makes you move

Rumi

Seeing into the heart of things

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin, French artist

To work with fear – notice, don’t analyse, don’t run

When we notice that the conditions of the mind and the body are just the way conditions are, it’s a simple recognition. It’s not an analysis and it is not anything special. It’s just a bare recognition, a direct knowing of whatever passes away. Knowing in this way demands a certain amount of patience; otherwise as soon as any fear, anger or unpleasantness arises, we will run away from it. So meditation is also the ability to endure, and bear with, the unpleasant. We don’t seek it out; we are not ascetics, looking for painful things to endure so that we can prove ourselves. We are simply recognizing the way it is right now. Meditation is established on that which is ordinary, not on that which is extraordinary.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way.

What is prayer

It cannot be put any simpler or more beautiful than this. Just pay attention. And let what we see enrich our inner life.

It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Mary Oliver, Prayer