Having and being enough, today

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.

Lynne Twist, The Surprising Truth of Sufficiency

 

On seeing some beautiful flowers

 

We are dust and to dust return.
In the end we’re
neither air, nor fire, nor water,
just
dirt,
neither more nor less, just dirt,
and maybe
some yellow flowers.

Pablo Neruda, Ode to Some Yellow Flowers

Trusting the ups and downs of life

Due to the current overlay of therapy terminology in our language, everyone now seems to wish for “closure.” This word is unfortunate: it is not faithful to the open-ended rhythm of experience. Creatures made of clay with porous skins and porous minds are quite incapable of the hermetic sealing that the strategy of “closure” seems to imply. The word completion is a truer word. Each experience has within it a dynamic of unfolding and a narrative of emergence. Oscar Wilde once said, “The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right.” When a person manages to trust experience and be open to it, the experience finds its own way to realization. Though such an ending may be awkward and painful, there is a sense of wholesomeness and authenticity about it. Then the heart will gradually find that this stage has run its course and the ending is substantial and true. Eventually the person emerges with a deeper sense of freedom, certainty, and integration.

The nature of calendar time is linear; it is made up of durations that begin and end. The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens. 

John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

Sunday Quote: The cure for unhappiness

There are people who are unhappy regardless of the work they do or the relationship they are in, and yet they continuously fool themselves into thinking that an external makeover will affect them internally.

Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment

Looking for treasure

What is the most precious gem in the world?  Certainly this life is precious — the opportunity to be alive is an irreplaceable gift — but can we really appreciate this life for what it is? If we want to find the precious gem in our life, where do we begin? Where do we look? Should we look outside somewhere, or should we look inside? And what does it mean to look inside? Are we really going to find something of value in our body, perhaps in our head or our belly? By pursuing these questions with your whole body and mind, you can discover the truth …. for yourself. But no matter how hard you try, you will never find what is truly precious if you look outside of yourself. You have to look within.

Dennis Genpo Merzel, The Path of the Human Being: Zen Teachings on the Bodhisattva Way

A day in the life

Waking up in the morning, I vow with all beings
to listen to those whom I love, especially to things they don’t say.

Lighting a candle for Buddha, I vow with all beings
to honor your clear affirmation: “Forget yourself and you’re free.”

When I stroll around in the city, I vow with all beings
to notice how lichen and grasses never give up in despair

Watching a spider at work, I vow with all beings
to cherish the web of the universe: touch one point and everything moves.

When the racket can’t be avoided, I vow with all beings
to close my eyes for a moment and find my treasure right here.

With tropical forests in danger, I vow with all beings
to raise hell with the people responsible and slash my consumption of trees.

Watching gardeners label their plants , I vow with all beings
to practice the old horticulture and let plants identify me.

On reading the words of Thoreau, I vow with all beings
to cherish our home-grown sages, who discern the perennial Way.

Falling asleep at last I vow with all beings
to enjoy the dark and the silence and rest in the vast unknown.

Robert Aiken, Verses for Zen Buddhist Practice