Tag: Joy

…and not elsewhere

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:River Barrow Towpath - geograph.org.uk - 489173.jpg

Meanwhile, here we are, missing the fullness of the present moment, which is where the soul resides.  It’s not like you have to go someplace else to get it.  So the challenge here is, Can we live this moment fully?  When you ask a group of people to spend five minutes watching their own breaths moving in and out of their bodies, just as an experiment,  they discover that their minds are like bubbling vats, and it’s not so easy to stay on the breath.  The mind has a life of its own.  It carries you away.  Over a lifetime, you may wind up in the situation where you are never actually where you find yourself.  You’re always someplace else, lost, in your head, and therefore in a kind of dysfunctional or nonoptimal state.  Why dysfunctional?  Because the only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets.  You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.The past in gone, and I don’t know what’s coming in the future. It’s obvious that if I want my life to be whole, to resonate with feeling and integrity and value and health, there’s only one way I can influence the future: by owning the present.  

Jon Kabat Zinn

photo kevin higgins

Sunday Quote: Spontaneity

Karl Duffy3 Comments

wild flowers 33

We need the tonic of wildness

Thoreau

Hidden depths

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Abraham bends down before the Three Angels.jpg

In almost every tradition there are tales of gods appearing in the guise of ordinary visitors. In the Hebrew Scriptures,  Abraham looked up and saw three men standing near. He welcomed them, not knowing they were angels. Here Mary Oliver tells of a similar story from Ancient Greece. The key is paying attention, which allows us see the riches in everyday occurrences. In this way some people show “hospitality to angels without knowing it”

In Greece,
a long time ago,
an old couple
opened their door

to two strangers
who were,
it soon appeared,
not men at all,

but gods.
It is my favorite story –
how the old couple
had almost nothing to give

but their willingness
to be attentive –
but for this alone
the gods loved them

and blessed them –
when they rose
out of their mortal bodies,
like a million particles of water

from a fountain,
the light
swept into all the corners
of the cottage,

and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down –
but still they asked for nothing

but the difficult life
which they had already.
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.

from Mary Oliver, Mockingbirds

Our capacity to notice

Karl Duffy4 Comments
thai 2

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Whatever comes up

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Bench on the Beach - Toronto 2010.jpg

Patience is the ability to watch something until it changes.

Ajahn Sucitto

photo Benson kua

Sunday Quote: Self-care

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:Bourton-on-the-water 1990 cream tea.jpg

You have to learn to get up from the table

when love is no longer being served.

Nina Simone

photo mrfinch