The path of meditation and the path of our lives altogether has to do with curiosity, inquisitiveness. The ground is ourselves; we’re here to study ourselves and to get to know ourselves now, not later. One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are. That’s not considered to be a problem; the point is to see it.
Pema Chodron.
photo Vitold Muratov
The emptiness of the desert makes it possible to learn the almost impossible:
the joyful acceptance of our uselessness.
Ivan Illich
Truly, 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.
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
Adrienne Rich, Prospective Immigrants Please Note
The Beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favour:
hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out
Hafiz
Image : Flickruser Brent and MariLynn
When we start to develop mindfulness, we are able to extend the sense of our domain beyond the seeming limitations of our body, of our immediate space. Try to understand that for most of human history, we have lived in larger spaces, like the wide valleys that occupy great physical space. We have the capacity to hear, see, smell, and taste and to know intuitively. We lived as communities. And it has been only a very short time that we have cut ourselves off from that, that we have lived in little separate boxes and have a very narrow sense of our mission and ourselves. We all still long for that connection. We all still yearn to have that more expansive sense of belonging and anchoring, spaciousness and connectedness. It is not that difficult to create. In meditation we create a sacred space, and the longer we abide in it, the more those old powerful urges and natural states of being emerge in us. And we begin to understand the nature of things and of change on a refined and profound level.
Steven Smith, Wise Navigating Through Change
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