Not striving

File:Hoffkirchen (5520092012).jpg

You don’t have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister Eckhart said very beautifully, “God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.” You don’t do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free. 

Anthony de Mello, sj.

photo paul nelhams

The secret for a full life

File:BBGMonarchButterflyWings.jpg

The butterfly counts not months but moments,

and has time enough.

Rabindranath Tagore

The Hearts Actions

File:Song thrush near Faringdon Folly - geograph.org.uk - 682555.jpg

Everything has two endings – a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.

Before a life, air.
And after.

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.

So it was when love slipped inside us.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.

Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not

Jane Hirshfield, born 1953, American poet:  Come,  Thief: Poems

photo brian robert marshall

Noticing what is right

photo

We often ask, “What’s wrong?”

Doing so we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger and depression and produce more such seeds. We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us.

We should learn to ask “What is not wrong?” and be in touch with that.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step

Trust

File:Bankeitumblr lm43mrAJZc1qzgealo1 1280Sakyamuni&Maitreya.jpg

The center that I cannot find
is known to my unconscious mind.

W.H. Auden

Born into colour

File:Colourful flowers.jpg

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into colour.

Rumi