Our task is to listen to the news
that is always arriving out of silence.
Rainer Maria Rilke
photo gwen and james anderson
Tag: Ireland
Springing up and falling back
Happiness is not to be found through great effort and willpower.
It is already present in open relaxation and letting go. Don’t strain.
There’s nothing to do or to undo. Whatever momentarily arises in body–mind has no real import at all, has very little reality whatsoever.
Why identify with it and become attached to it, passing judgment on it and on yourself and others?
Far better simply to let the entire play just happen on its own, springing up and falling back again like waves, without ‘rectifying’ things or manipulating things.
Just noticing how everything vanishes and then magically reappears, again and again and again. Time without end.
It’s only our searching for happiness that prevents us from seeing it.
Lama Gendun Rinpoche, Free and Easy
Developing a refuge
As I age I am grateful to find that a silence has begun to gather in me,
coexisting with my tempers and my fears,
unchanged by my joys or my pain.
Rachel Naomi Remen
photo of monastery garden Bolton Abbey Kildare
A real miracle
I like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality. People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child – our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness
photo richard webb
Right here, right now
It [our way] is never apart from this very place;
what is the use of traveling around to practice?
Dogen, General Advice on the Principles of Zazen
The full moon
Prompted by seeing a beautiful (almost) full moon in the clear Kildare sky last evening:
At night, deep in the mountains
I sit in meditation
The affairs of men never reach here
Everything is quiet and empty
The incense has been swallowed up
by the endless night;
My robe has become a garment of dew.
Unable to sleep, I walk into the woods;
Suddenly, above the highest peak,
the full moon appears.
Ryokan, Zen Buddhist monk, 1758 – 1831
photo Andrew Choy
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