May you take time to celebrate
the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
May you experience each day
as a sacred gift
woven around the heart of wonder.
John O’Donohue, Benedictus
Today
Tag: Joy
Finding the way back home
Its important for me to meditate…to let go of my thoughts breath by breath and instead slowly lean back into that which was inside me before I was born, and which will endure when the rest of me dies. For me its like something I’ve longed for all my life, without knowing what it was. As though someone, for as long as I can remember, has been sitting on my shoulder whispering “Come home”
So how does one find the way back home? The best answer to that question I’ve come across so far comes from Meister Eckhart, a German priest in the early fourteenth century who was supposedly enlightened. After a Sunday sermon, an elderly member of his congregation came up to him and said “Meister Eckhart, you have clearly met God. Please help me to get to know God like you do. But your advice must be very simple as my memory is failing me”
“It’s very simple” Meister Eckhart replied. “All you need to do to meet God the way I have, is to fully understand who is looking out through your eyes”
Bjorn Natthiko Lindeblad, I May be Wrong, and other wisdoms from life as a Forest Monk.
Relax the fist
I hope you can live your life with slightly less firmly clenched fists and slightly more open hands. Slightly less control. Slightly more trust. Slightly less I need to know everything beforehand. Slightly more take life as it comes. It does all of us a world of good. Life doesn’t have to be lived with constant anxiety about things not turning out the way we want. We don’t have to make ourselves smaller than we are. We have a choice. Do we want to grab life by he throat or do we want to embrace it?
Relax that fist as often as you can.
Bjorn Natthiko Lindeblad, I May be Wrong, and other wisdoms from life as a Forest Monk.
Sunday Quote: We can choose joy
It’s not what happens but how we relate to it…
Is it the weather that is cold,
or is it the person who is cold?
Think neither cold nor heat — at that moment, where is the self to be found?
Dogen, again, in his commentary on Dongshan’s (807–869) koan “Cold and Heat”
Being the moon
Everyone wants to be the sun
to brighten someone’s life,
but why not the moon,
to shine on someone’s darkest hour?
Don Jose Ruiz
Sunday Quote: Not demanding more
Nor with impatience from the season asked
More than its timely produce; rather loved
The hours for what they are.
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 5
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