We humans have a tendency to lean into the future or to seek something “more exciting” than what is in front of us. The challenge is to be fully awake and fully invested in the completeness of the present moment.
The moon and the sun are eternal travellers.
Even the years wander on.
A lifetime adrift in a boat or old age leading a tired horse into the years,
every day is a journey and the journey itself is home
Matsuo Basho, 17th century Japanese poet, Narrow Road to the Interior.
I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you
Clarissa-Pinkola-Estés
Only our searching for happiness
prevents us from seeing it.
It’s like a vivid rainbow which you pursue
without ever catching,
or a dog chasing its own tail.
Although peace and happiness
do not exist as an actual thing or place,
it is always available and accompanies you every instant.
Don’t believe in the reality of good and bad experiences;
they are like today’s ephemeral weather,
like rainbows in the sky.
Wanting to grasp the ungraspable,
you exhaust yourself in vain.
As soon as you open and relax
this tight fist of grasping,
infinite space is there –
open, inviting and comfortable.
Make use of this spaciousness,
this freedom and natural ease.
Don’t search any further
looking for the great awakened elephant,
who is already resting quietly at home
in front of your own hearth.
from a ‘vajra poem’ by Lama Gendun Rinpoche, 1918-1997, Tibetan Buddhist teacher
What progress, you ask, have I made?
I have begun to be a friend to myself.
Hecato of Rhodes, c. 100 BC, Stoic philosopher, quoted in Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium VI
“No-thought” does not mean cutting off thinking – it means there is no fixation with regard to the free flow of our thinking. We don’t need to reify or solidify what we experience into my thoughts, my feelings. If self-grasping is present, then thoughts don’t flow. When we suffer, we are caught in the middle of the stories that we’re fabricating, and, in this way, we prolong our suffering.
Guo Gu, Silent Illumination
Set wide the window
Let me drink the day
Edith Wharton
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