All life as practice

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing, or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of ones being, satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some arena, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

Martha Graham, American dancer and choreographer.

Not seeking elsewhere

Joy isn’t something we have to find.

Joy is who we are if we’re not preoccupied with something else.

When we try to find joy, we are simply adding a thought – and an unhelpful one, at that – onto the basic fact of what we are.

Charlotte Joko Beck

A path full of adventures

The spirit in which we approach anything new – a new day, a new week  or a new year – is the key to how we will experience it. Most of our suffering is caused by our minds. Pay attention to your interval and beginning moments today, to the gaps between tasks or before we go into a meeting, or  – especially –  to the moment before we start a conversation. Are we open to receive whatever happens, freshly, in a spirit of adventure?

Vα εύχεσαι να είναι μακρύς ο δρόμος, γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις

Wish that your journey be a long one,

full of adventures, full of knowing.

Cavafy’s advice to Odysseus before he set out on his voyage back to Ithaca

Seeing things differently

Being lost is not at all a bad thing – if you know you’re lost and you know how to benefit from it spiritually. Most of us consider being lost a bummer, highly undesirable or even terrifying. We all have important things to do, there’s not enough time in the day as it is, thank you, and getting lost is a major fly in the ointment of success, a monkey wrench in the gearbox of progress. In the Western world, where “progress is our most important product,” we are encouraged from our earliest years to know exactly where we are at all times and precisely where we are going. Yes, such knowledge is often desirable if not necessary, but not knowing is of equal benefit. Indeed, the deepest form of wandering requires that we be lost.

Imagine yourself lost in your career or marriage, or in the middle of your life. You have goals, a place you want to be, but you don’t know how to reach that place. Maybe you don’t know exactly what you want, you just have a vague desire for a better place. Although it may not seem like it, you are on the threshold of a great opportunity. Begin to trust that place of not knowing. Surrender to it. You’re lost. There will be grief. A cherished outcome appears to be unobtainable or undefinable. In order to make the shift from being lost to being present, admit to yourself that your goal may never be reached. Though perhaps difficult, doing so will create entirely new possibilities for fulfillment.

Bill Plotkin, Being Lost

Thanksgiving : We start by simply noticing

Developing an ongoing habit of gratitude starts by taking the time to be with ourselves and to notice the beauty that is all around us:

Do we need to make a special effort to enjoy the beauty of the blue sky? Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it? No, we just enjoy it. Each second, each minute of our lives can be like this. Wherever we are, any time, we have the capacity to enjoy the sunshine, the presence of each other, even the sensation of our breathing. We don’t need to go to China to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t have to travel into the future to enjoy our breathing. We can be in touch with these things right now. It would be a pity if we are only aware of suffering.

We are so busy we hardly have time to look at the people we love, even in our own household, and to look at ourselves. Society is organized in a way that even when we have some leisure time, we don’t know how to use it to get back in touch with ourselves. We have millions of ways to lose this precious time – we turn on the TV or pick up the telephone, or start the car and go somewhere. We are not used to being with ourselves, and we act as if we don’t like ourselves and are trying to escape from ourselves.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace is every step

The winds in the trees, the sound of the stream

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and peace that is “heard” when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say when there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.

Thomas Merton, Preface to Japanese translation of Thoughts in Solitude