It is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,’ and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.
John O’Donohue
If you view everything as practice,
your suffering will disappear.
Shido Bunan, 1603-1676, Japanese Zen master
In a village or in a forest,
In deep water or on dry land
Wherever an awakened person lives
That place is a peaceful dwelling
Dhammapada, 98
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is.
William Stafford A Valley Like This
If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
Marcel Proust In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2
I can hear the rooks and jackdaws busy gathering twigs for their nests in the trees above my window. The Buddha, it is said, was so still in meditation that the birds were able to nest in his hair. Similarly, St Kevin, an early Irish saint, was so calm when praying with his arms outstretched that a blackbird came and built a nest in his hand, laid her eggs and went on to hatch them. Images of how the mind can become steady, settled in the present moment, even in the midst of so much change and ongoing challenges.
Nothing can help you more than a trained mind, not even your loving parents.
The Buddha
We can make our minds
so like still water
that beings gather about us
that they may see,
it may be, their own images,
and live for a moment with a clearer,
perhaps even with a fiercer life
because of our quiet,
our silence.
W.B Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.
Seamus Heaney, St Kevin and the Blackbird
Statue of Saint Kevin by Timothy P Schmalz at Knock taken from Knock Shrine website
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