Tag: Joy

Sunday Quote: Adventure

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I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you

Clarissa-Pinkola-Estés

Already quietly here

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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

Sunday Quote: real progress

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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

Caught in the middle

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“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

Sunday Quote: Drink in

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Set wide the window

Let me drink the day

Edith Wharton

Holding the tension

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We must learn to hold the tension between the reality of the moment and the possibility that something better might emerge. The insight at the heart of nonviolence is that  we live in a tragic gap – a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be. It is a gap that never has been and never will be closed. If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility in hopes of being opened to a third way.  

Parker J. Palmer